The Case for Platform as a Service -...

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Mi MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE

The Case for Platform as a ServiceFinding a place for PaaS in the enterprise

Mobile App Development from the Ground Up

Can Hosted Email Replace Exchange?

Super-Charge Your Storage

JUNE 2013

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STEVE GUNDERSON: OPEN-SOURCING THE ENTERPRISE

BRIAN MADDEN: DON’T CONFLATE CLOUD AND MOBILE FILE SYNCING

MAKE WAY FOR PAAS

HOSTED EMAIL SETUPS WORTH A LOOK

USING ALL-SSD ARRAYS TO MEGA- CHARGE YOUR DATA CENTER

BOB PLANKERS: TEACHING THE DATA CENTER TO FETCH

2 MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • JUNE 2013

One day when my son was about 4, he announced, apropos of nothing, “Mom, I’m the yes-er, and you’re the no-er.”

The sting of that pronouncement still hurts. How could he say such a thing? Hadn’t I been the one to al-low him a second dish of ice cream? Is that something a “no-er” would do? And sure, I had recently forbid him from jumping on the bed, but honestly, do you know how many emergency room visits originate from jumping on the bed?

IT operations professionals are also often billed as no-ers: resistant to change, stick-in-the-mud spoilsports who can always be counted on to be the annoying voice of rea-son. IT is the rational Dana Scully to loopy Fox Mulder, the pragmatic butler Jeeves to the flighty Bertie Wooster, the grounded Marge to the rest of the insane Simpson family.

I’m not sure how that characterization came about, but I think it’s unfair. Sure, IT pros are responsible for keeping systems up and running, which feeds into any conservative tendencies they may have. But at their core, most IT pros are really innovators and risk takers, and care more about getting things done than about doing things the safe way.

This month’s issue of Modern Infrastructure is full of examples of IT professionals saying yes and taking risks. We see IT organizations ditching stalwart on-premises email systems like Microsoft Exchange in favor of new-fangled hosted email platforms like Gmail or Office 365 (“Hosted Email Setups Worth a Look,” by Matt Gervais and Ed Scannell). We have storage administrators, the types reputed to wear a belt and suspenders, kicking the tires on all-SSD arrays for the massive performance boost it can give their applications (“Using All-SSD Ar-rays to Mega-Charge Your Data Center,” by Phil Good-win). We even learn of mousy insurance companies that are developing mobile applications to build loyalty and better serve customers (see Diana Hwang’s profile of In-dependence Blue Cross). Finally, we have operations pros implementing an entire Platform as a Service (PaaS) in-house, in order to better serve their developer customers (“Make Way for PaaS,”).

“We want to be platform engineers,” said Chris Turra, a Web operations engineer at Mozilla, on his decision to implement in-house PaaS. “We want to enable devel-opers to work at a faster velocity, and never get in their way.”

Does that sound like a no-er to you? n

EDITOR’S LETTER | ALEX BARRETT

Yes-ers and No-ers


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Building a Mobile Health Care App from Scratch Health insurance companies aren’t exactly known for streamlined information access and delivery. Inde-pendence Blue Cross thought mobile technology might change that, helping it take a competitive stance and bet-ter support customers.

“Providing access to [customers’] health information anywhere, anytime is what we call the ‘retailization of health care,’” said Greg Barnowsky, chief enterprise

architect of Independence Blue Cross (IBC). Earlier this year, the insurance company launched the IBX app, an iOS and Android mobile application that offers its 3.8 million subscribers access to their medical information at any time, such as during a doctor’s visit. It’s the first mobile venture for the Philadelphia-based company, which plans to expand the app over time.

Modern Infrastructure recently spoke with Barnowsky, who led the charge on IBX’s app, to discuss the business and technical decisions that went into its creation.

How did the idea for the IBX mobile app come about?

We launched the Digital Engagement Center of Excel-lence [CoE] to help us create consumer “stickiness” to our brand. We think of digital engagement as applying mobile applications that address three pillars: those applications that differentiate us as a health-care payer, those applications that address mo-bile health, and those applications that promote gamification, or fun. All three can be applied standalone or in combination with any mobile application. The underlying theme across all of this is the customer experience. We run our prospective application look and feel through

CURRENTS6/13All the news you can use about modern infrastructure

BARNOWSKY

http://searchcloudapplications.techtarget.com/definition/gamification

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customer experience trials before we finalize the details of the application.

What were some of your up-front technical

considerations?

We had a mobile technology strategy before launching our Digital Engagement CoE. A key principle of our strat-egy was to ensure that applications we built were porta-ble and adhered to industry standards such as HTML5. We did not want to lock ourselves into a proprietary tool set because the vendor didn’t adhere to industry

standards. We looked at public-domain mobile tools as well. We decided against these tools for a number of rea-sons, but the main reasons [were] supportability and risk, including potential issues with scalability, security, test-ing costs, cross-platform support, etc., over time.

Did you develop the app in-house or outsource it?

It was a combined effort of multiple departments. We decided early on that we would partner with Kony, an application tool development vendor. We used our own people to develop our first Kony-based mobile applica-tion. We wanted to build and own our intellectual prop-erty. We teamed closely with our marketing department, which told us what they wanted from an overall digital engagement strategy. Our internal corporate communi-cations department created all of the themes and graph-ical design. Finally, we partnered with our informatics data warehouse teams for providing the back-end data. Our information services department developed and assembled the application, tested it and deployed it to Android and Apple stores. In upcoming releases, we will SCREEN SHOTS OF THE IBX MOBILE APP

WE DID NOT WANT TO LOCK OURSELVES INTO A PROPRIETARY TOOL SET BECAUSE THE VENDOR DIDN’T ADHERE TO INDUSTRY STANDARDS.

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provide support for Windows Phone, as well as iPad, Android and Windows tablets.

What kind of integration challenges did you face?

When you talk about any mobile application, the chal-lenge is getting access to data. The first thing we dis-covered is that we had data-access gaps in regards to retrieving data in a format that was easy to use.

Having a Web-oriented architecture or APIs [applica-tion programming interfaces] to access back-end infor-mation is a plus. So, when building a mobile application, one starts to think in terms of APIs. That is, “How [can we] create APIs across these individual platforms to im-prove my delivery speed?”

So identification of the data-access gaps and creation of flexible API wrappers that can be leveraged in the next mobile application becomes a key focus in application development. The result is a faster time to market for the next release with better customer experience due to im-proved application response times.

In addition to development tools, we had to consider

mobile device management [MDM] tools. The MDM tools are complementary to mobile development tools and allow us to deploy applications internally via the MDM tool set, as well as ensure that if needed, we can do remote wiping of devices that we choose to control using MDM.

What else did you learn?

Select top talent, and expect a lot from your teams. To mitigate risk, we evaluated, interviewed and selected team members who knew the company’s investment in mobility would require a similar investment in their own personal time [outside of regular work hours].

Once we picked the team, we also picked a seasoned professional to run the mobile development team who had the right mix of management, technology and lead-ership skills. Both business and technology departments were asked to contribute funding by way of resources and time to the Digital Engagement CoE effort. We also chose to develop and deliver applications iteratively using the Agile development methodology—a real must-have when developing mobile applications.

How do you measure application usage?

We have a plethora of measurements to report on what’s being accessed, including how often the applica-tion is being accessed and what functions are being accessed and when. The issue is, What do you want to turn into actionable items that are meaningful to our business?

WHEN YOU TALK ABOUT ANY MOBILE APPLICATION, THE CHALLENGE IS GETTING ACCESS TO DATA.

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For example, based on utilization, we can determine what is and isn’t working to improve features. Based on business needs, we can improve individual member medication utilization so that the next version of the app would include new features such as reminders to your medicine cabinet or to exclude other features that are not being used.

What other areas are you planning to address?

Mobile health and gamification are two other areas we will continue to pursue over the current health-care payer core mobile capabilities. You see [other possibil-ities for] mobile health in the medicine cabinet, and personal health records for example, with health and wellness tracking. Every app we build has some pieces of core intellectual payer support, mobile health or some level of gamifica-tion. We see both mobile health and gamification as key areas to continue to pursue. Consumers expect their apps

to provide some fun and be a positive experience, driving them back to our applications.

Have you seen a return on investment yet?

The uptake in the release of the application since we de-livered it into app stores in January has tripled. We don’t charge for this app, but we’ve seen the investment we’re going after is a really great consumer experience. We are very early in our investment but continue to seek out areas to improve customer convenience and satisfaction.

—DIANA HWANG

BASED ON UTILIZATION, WE CAN DETERMINE WHAT IS AND ISN’T WORKING TO IMPROVE FEATURES.

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CURRENTS | OVERHEARD

“ Our data center was in the basement. We had a data center below sea level, which scared me as a C level.”KEN MICHAELS, president and COO at Hachette Book Group, at the Markley Group Data Center Summit

“ Along came the public cloud. She was fast. She was beautiful. She was unbridled.” JIM O’NEILL, CIO for HubSpot, speaking in front of a back-drop of a unicorn-shaped cloud at OpenStack Summit Portland

“ Has anyone tried using the eleva-tors here? It’s obscenely com-plicated—kind of like a prior BlackBerry.” RICHARD PIASENTIN, Black-Berry vice president, at the BlackBerry Experience Forum

“ What’s missing from centers of excellence? Probably excellence.” STEVE EASTHAM of Best Buy, ex-tolling the virtues of DevOps during a keynote presentation at OpenStack Summit Portland

“ Our early clouds were not unicorns. They were horses with [traffic] cones on their heads.” NATHANAEL BURTON, computer sci-entist for the National Security Agency, in a keynote presentation at OpenStack Summit Portland

“ I tell IT, ‘We’re smart, we’re smarter than the finance people. IT gets lumped in with overhead. IT is not overhead. We are the business. We should start to act like it.’”MICHAEL HUGOS, CIO for the Center for Systems Innovation, at the Markley Group Data Center Summit

OVERHEARD UNICORNS AND

SMART IT

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NEWS IN REVIEW

Open Source Clouds Roll In Slowly but surely, open source software is gaining significant momentum in the world of cloud computing.

While a proprietary cloud—Amazon Web Services—looms large as the universally acknowledged 800-pound gorilla in the cloud market, other big vendors are throw-ing their weight behind open source cloud orchestration tools like OpenStack and CloudStack, as well as open source infrastructure automation tools that come in handy for clouds, such as Puppet and Chef.

Take, for example, Verizon Terremark’s April an-nouncement that it will invest in the open source Xen Project for server virtualization and Apache CloudStack for cloud orchestration. Or Cisco Systems’ founding of the Open Daylight Project, an open source project based on software-defined networking. Or VMware’s public pledges to work with OpenStack, which is not to men-tion the company’s multiple millions invested in Puppet Labs; VMware joined a roster of OpenStack collaborators last year that also includes Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Red Hat and Rackspace, among others.

Vendors getting in on open source projects are par-tially hedging their bets, said Glenn O’Donnell, an analyst with Forrester Research Inc. But in cases like OpenStack, “The community is big enough they’d be fools not to jump on the bandwagon,” he said.

At heart, that bandwagon is user-driven, and cloud computing users include companies like Facebook: those that are big enough to force vendors to adopt an open source stance to win a share of their business.

Meanwhile, at Facebook and other Web-scale compa-nies that have the biggest cloud computing deployments to date, open source is deeply embedded in the culture.

“Open source is what allows our industry to continue to move forward and continue to mature,” said Phil Di-bowitz, systems engineer for the social networking giant. “If you don’t utilize open source, you end up reinventing every wheel.”

On the other hand, a pattern of improvements to open source software contributed back to the commu-nity creates a kind of innovation relay—improvements are picked up and run with by the next cool company to come along.

“That collaboration is what will continue to enable our industry to mature and move fast,” Dibowitz said.

Another pragmatic reason for open source’s growing popularity? Cost.

“At cloud scale, the common names in commercial

OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE IS GAINING SIGNIFICANT MOMENTUM IN THE WORLD OF CLOUD COMPUTING.

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software tend to get into licensing costs into the strato-sphere,” said Forrester’s O’Donnell. “It’s no surprise people who are building cloud infrastructure at scale are using as much open source as they possibly can.”

Still, open source projects have yet to take over the cloud world. OpenStack, for example, still faces numer-ous maturity questions, including whether it has the ability to perform hot upgrades, and the inter-cloud mi-gration promised by such community standards is still years away from realization. CloudStack has been in the

market longer, but the industry trend is toward Open-Stack, Verizon Terremark investment aside. And Chef and Puppet are handy tools, but cloud deployments need more than that to run smoothly.

The future is, as always, hard to predict, but O’Donnell sees signs pointing toward success for open source move-ments in the next three to five years.

“Microsoft is now involved in Linux,” he said. “Overall, if there’s a force strong enough within an open source movement, you battle it at your own peril.” —BETH PARISEAU

Mailbag u “Missing the mark on our initial storage calculations did not jeopardize the ultimate success of our VDI [virtual

desktop infrastructure] deployment at Foley & Lardner LLP. We certainly had to make the necessary adjustments to

right-size our storage and server cluster hardware as moved further into our deployment. We now have more than 1,700

desktops virtualized, and our move to VDI has positioned our firm to securely embrace BYOD in a big way, which has

been another huge benefit for us. Despite some of the early-adopter pains we experienced in our VDI deployment, we’ve

now been enjoying all of the gains and benefits that come along with VDI. In fact, the combination of VDI and BYOD are

now saving our firm upwards of a half-million dollars annually. That’s a huge success in my book.”

—RICK VARJU, director of engineering and operations, Foley & Lardner LLP, on

“Underestimating storage requirements leads to VDI failure,” April MI

u “[Whether you choose nonpersistent or persistent desktops] depends on the use cases. In education, call centers, for

task workers, you will usually choose nonpersistent desktops. ... You can use personalized profiles (roaming profiles or sim-

ilar) or even have no profiles at all. For knowledge workers, persistent desktop is certainly better. But then, why bother with

hosted VDI? There are very interesting alternatives such as VMware/Wanova Mirage, Citrix VDI, etc.”

—SearchVirtualDesktop.com reader, on “Nonpersistent vs. persistent desktops: Why VDI should persist,” April MI

http://searchvirtualdesktop.techtarget.com/feature/Underestimating-storage-requirements-leads-to-VDI-failure

http://searchvirtualdesktop.techtarget.com/opinion/Nonpersistent-vs-persistent-desktops-Why-VDI-should-persist

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20

60

100

No Yes Don’t know

66%

19% 15%

9+56+1+34r

CURRENTS | READER SNAPSHOT

READER SNAPSHOT

SOURCE: SEARCHENTERPRISEDESKTOP.COM READER SURVEY

Tablets

Other

Zero clients

Thin clients

Generalist

SOURCE: SEARCHVIRTUALDESKTOP.COM READER SURVEY SOURCE: SEARCHDATACENTER.COM READER SURVEY

What do you primarily use for VDI hardware?

Are you an IT versalist, generalist or specialist?

Do you plan to adopt Windows 8?

13+64+23r9%

56%

64%

13%

23%

34%

1%

Versalist

Specialist

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EXPLAINED

Silicon Photonics Those humble chips running the servers in your data center are evolving, as optical components move onto the chip itself. Known as silicon photonics technology, this method involves the use of silicon semiconductors as the medium for optical signals, allowing much faster dig-ital signaling than is currently possible with traditional electron-based semiconductor devices.

Silicon photonics involves several core components. First, a laser is at the heart of any optical device. Cur-rent lasers use silicon and indium phosphide to produce coherent infrared laser light. Photons must then be modulated to break the light into optical pulses. Optical waveguides and other interconnections are necessary to move pulses from one location to another. And since a 100% optical system (e.g., all optical chips with optical interconnections) is probably still decades away, there must also be a means of converting electronic signals into optical signals and back again.

Fortunately, all these optical components can be fabri-cated using the same basic technologies currently used to manufacture electronic semiconductors. In fact, it is en-tirely possible to fabricate electronic and optical compo-nents on the same substrate, to create hybrid chips that can perform myriad telecom and network functions.

Over the near term, silicon photonics chips will be de-ployed in high-speed signal transmission systems, which far exceed the capabilities of copper cabling. Earlier this year, Kotura Inc. announced its Optical Engine, which is capable of achieving data rates of 100 Gbps through the use of wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM), allowing multiple data signals at different wavelengths to share the same optical pathways. Such devices are suited for data centers and high-performance computing (HPC) applications where standard copper-based Ethernet networking is inadequate. Other major chip makers like IBM, Intel and NEC are also developing silicon photon-ics devices.

As silicon photonics evolves and chips become more sophisticated, expect to see the technology used more in processing tasks such as interconnecting multiple cores within processor chips to boost access to shared cache and buses. Eventually, silicon photonics may be involved in actual processing—augmenting and perhaps even re-placing a chip’s semiconductor transistors with optical equivalents for greater computing performance.

Other applications of silicon photonics include bio-metrics, where researchers at universities like the Cen-ter for Nano- and Biophotonics at Ghent University in Belgium are using the technology to create implantable medical devices like blood glucose meters using an on-chip spectrometer, along with other medical diagnostic/detection devices. —STEPHEN J. BIGELOW

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CURRENTS | SUMMING IT UP

SUMMING IT UP45

+22+28+5u

Will continue using

Will begin using

Have no plans

Will evaluate

SOURCE: SEARCHVIRTUALDESKTOP.COM READER SURVEY SOURCE: TECHTARGET 2013 IT PRIORITIES SURVEY; RESPONDENTS COULD CHOOSE MORE THAN ONE OPTION.

What are your plans for using Platform as a Service? Why did you choose the private cloud?

Which of these consumerization policies do you use or will you implement this year?

28%

45%

22%

5%

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80

Achieve cost savings

Bring moreautomation to IT

Best fit for businesscomputing needs

Improve staff focus/productivity

67%

57%

53%

41%

Allow users to purchase

their own smartphones

0

20

40

60

54% 37% 32% 19% 18% 17%

Allow users to buy their own tablets

for use on the corporate network

Allow users to buy their own laptops or desktops

for use on the corporate network

Allow users to select their

own data protection

and transfer tools, such as Dropbox

Allow users to select their

own email, such as Gmail

Allow users to select their own

applications, such as

Google Docs

SOURCE: TECHTARGET 2013 IT PRIORITIES SURVEY. RESPONDENTS COULD CHOOSE MORE THAN ONE OPTION.

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13 MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE

AT A GLANCE

Preventing Runaway DR Costs

IT professional: Mahmoud Harb, site operations managerCompany: Careerbuilder.com, an online job recruitment site Problem: How to back up massive amounts of job-seeker data from data centers in Atlanta, Amsterdam and Hong Kong to a backup data center in Chicago. The goal was to replicate data quickly, with a low error rate and without incurring substantial costs for a major wide area network (WAN) upgrade.

“The ability to push data from our primary data center to a disaster recovery [DR] site was becom-ing a challenge,” Harb said. “We had more users as our database grew and the amount of data that we have to keep outgrew our setup. We needed a technology that could trans-fer data from a primary data center to the DR data center at a rea-sonable cost. Data freshness for backups also went from about 30 days to less than 30 minutes.”Technology solution: Hard-ware- and software-based WAN optimization using Silver Peak

9700 and VRX-8 virtual appliances.“We had tried Citrix Systems’ NetScaler and F5 Net-

works’ WANJet,” Harb said.

How WAN Optimization Helps Disaster Recovery StrategySpeed of data transfer. “Data has to be copied to all four data centers. And the data hops have to happen within a reasonable amount of time.”Cost. “We do not want to rearrange our network design or topology to fit that [new] technology. We could take

advantage of our existing WAN setup and transfer the data over our existing Internet connectivity.”

Ease of administration. “There is no need to get a top engineer to run the appliance. It is self-healing and -administering. With a little bit of knowledge, you can get it running.” Support. “We have a small crew that runs a

large operation (with a ratio of about 300 servers per administrator). We don’t

have people that can sit on the phone and talk to vendors all day long. So support was one of the key issues.”

In the end, Careerbuilder.com avoided a major WAN upgrade, saving the company hundreds of thousands of dollars in just a few months. —LAUREN HORWITZ

CURRENTS | AT A GLANCE

MAHMOUD HARB


Companies are increasingly comparing open source applications with commercial proprietary applications. As commercial software costs escalate, the attraction of open source technologies is obvious.

Open source application software has long been viewed as a niche solution that is not suitable for mis-sion-critical business processes. In the past, it was lim-ited to academic settings. But a new variant of this model has emerged that provides commercial-grade software support and legal protection from IP indemnification. Enterprise-class, open source application software could become the preferred solution.

The Best Ways to Use Open SourceLinux operating systems have become a dominant factor

in data center operations across the globe. Users can take advantage of public-domain Linux solutions or commer-cially supported versions that provide support options and service-level agreements.

Other widely used open source solutions include con-tent management software, application server utilities and Web browsers. Each of these categories has strong support for collaborative, open, pragmatic software li-censes that provide software for the public good. Not only do these technologies provide robust core function-ality, but they include developer-level documentation,

APIs and access to hundreds of add-on modules. In the application space, there is growing acceptance

for business applications like customer relationship man-agement and enterprise resource planning. For example,

THERE IS GROWING ACCEPTANCE FOR BUSINESS APPLICATIONS LIKE CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT AND ENTER-PRISE RESOURCE PLANNING.

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FROM THE FRONT LINES STEVE GUNDERSON

Open-Sourcing the Enterprise

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FROM THE FRONT LINES | STEVE GUNDERSON

I know a large government supplier using open source ERP for supply chain logistics to the Department of De-fense. Open source technologies provided the baseline functionality and the platform to support business re-quirements that include managing more than 1 million inventory items among 20 stocking locations around the world.

Some commercial-grade open source combines the best of both worlds: full support and upgrades, coupled with zero licensing fees and full access to the source code. It’s a compelling value proposition: the only fee is

low-cost annual maintenance; it’s modular and exten-sible by design; there’s a large library of open source, bolt-on apps; the software is fully supported; and all source code and executables are provided.

Open Source: The Next GenerationIt could be that software developers release proprietary software solutions and withhold the source code from users, as they consider the source code their equity, but we haven’t seen this happen yet. Alternatively, open source providers distribute the software and source code free of charge, with the expectation that a large audience of users will provide enhancements and extensions to the software, increasing its value. Commercial support (upgrades, bug fixes, version updates) of open source software has removed the barriers to widespread adop-tion by large companies. The next generation of open source software solutions has arrived and should be seriously considered when evaluating business applica-tions. n

STEVE GUNDERSON is a principal at Transitional Data Services.

SOME COMMERCIAL-GRADE OPEN SOURCE COMBINES THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS: FULL SUPPORT AND UPGRADES, COUPLED WITH ZERO LICENS-ING FEES AND FULL ACCESS TO THE SOURCE CODE.

http://www.transitionaldata.com/


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A few months ago, I presented a session at the Modern Infrastructure Decisions conference in New York. One of the attendee questions was something that I’ve heard a lot recently.

I said that, in today’s world, IT departments must pro-vide some kind of modern mobile file-syncing solution. If you don’t like or trust Dropbox, fine; there are dozens more to choose from, like Box, SugarSync, SkyDrive and Google Drive. I don’t care which option companies choose. I just care that they choose one of these rather than the old-school network share that requires a user to be connected to access files, a desktop OS and a virtual private network.

“But what you don’t understand,” an attendee said, “is that we can never go to these types of solutions, because

our company will never allow all those corporate files to be out there in the public cloud.” But here’s what I ar-gue: You can implement modern file-syncing solutions without using the public cloud. You can run them 100% on-premises, giving users all the features they need and bringing your environment into this decade, all while be-ing on-site, private and secure.

The Cloud-Free OptionHow? It’s simple. The actual software that enables mo-bile file syncing—the client apps for iOS, Android, Mac, Windows and the Web; the syncing engine to move files back and forth; and the Internet-connected services to power them all—has nothing to do with whether you store your repository in your company or in some public cloud location. It’s just like email. Email is fundamentally a “cloud” or an “Internet” service, but you can choose to have email pushed to all devices anywhere while still maintaining your email servers and repositories in your own data center.

The same is true for these mobile file-syncing services. Sure, some of them don’t allow on-premises setups. You can’t go to Dropbox or Box and say, “Can you sell me your software so I can build my own environment?” But that just means you’re looking at the wrong vendors, because many vendors make Dropbox-like products that

END-USER ADVOCATE BRIAN MADDEN

Don’t Conflate Cloud and Mobile File Syncing

http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/guides/Modern-Infrastructure-Decisions-conference-coverage

http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/guides/Modern-Infrastructure-Decisions-conference-coverage

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END-USER ADVOCATE | BRIAN MADDEN

absolutely can be installed 100% on-premises. Many of these products are from familiar vendors, such as Citrix Sharefile or VMware Horizon Workspace.

Other on-premises solutions come from WatchDox, RES Software, Nomadesk, GroupLogic and dozens more. (Heck, even Novell has one!) And of course, these cor-porate-focused services offer many enterprise features such as encryption, digital rights management, data loss protection and remote file wiping.

So next time you hear someone say that you need to provide a new Internet-connected service to your users like some consumer cloud company, remember that providing a similar service at the corporate level doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to store anything in the cloud. n

BRIAN MADDEN is an opinionated, super-technical, fiercely indepen-dent desktop virtualization and consumerization expert. Write to him at [email protected].

http://searchconsumerization.techtarget.com/news/2240183023/Novell-Filr-offers-on-premises-storage-and-file-sharing-alternative


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CLOUD COMPUTING | ALEX BARRETT

MAKE WAY FOR PaaSIf Platform as a Service is the next big thing, how should IT professionals prepare?

Cloud is catching on in a big way, and as it matures, adoption keeps growing and new uses emerge. Those in the IT world are getting ever more comfort-able with Software as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service. But Plat-form as a Service remains a murky endeavor.

For a certain class of applications, Software as a Ser-vice (SaaS) is a slam dunk, providing access to complex applications in a way that does not require a steep outlay of cash and involves low management overhead. Like-wise, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is increasingly attractive to many organizations, offering access to vast amounts of compute, storage and bandwidth resources that can be manipulated much like on-premises infra-structure, with no up-front costs.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a whole other ballgame. Favored by forward-looking developers, PaaS’ main value proposition is increased productivity and faster deploy-ment times. PaaS also provides built-in provisions for

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automatic scaling and failover, freeing developers from having to learn these complex coding techniques if they want those capabilities in their applications.

“When you combine a prebuilt OS and development platform, application deployment is dramatically sim-pler,” said Roger Jennings, principal consultant of Oak-Leaf Systems Inc. and a .NET developer. While most IT professionals naturally gravitate to IaaS for their cloud needs, it takes just one-tenth the time to stand up a web-site on Microsoft’s Windows Azure PaaS, for example, he claimed.

Today, the market for PaaS is a small fraction of the overall public cloud. But if PaaS takes off—and many ex-perts believe that it will—that could have wide-ranging implications for IT professionals, ushering in yet more changes in their roles and responsibilities. But the mar-ket is still in its infancy, making it difficult for enterprise IT to predict how many and what types of PaaS platforms and PaaS-resident applications they may be asked to sup-port down the road.

Anatomy of a PaaS The first thing most IT shops need to get straight is the difference between true PaaS platforms and pseudo PaaS.

“Remember all the cloudwashing that we used to see from infrastructure providers?” said James Staten, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. “It’s much worse with PaaS.”

Staten said he routinely sees vendors trying to pass off garden-variety IaaS with a few added services as PaaS,

confusing developers and operations professionals alike.

At its core, a true PaaS platform must include an ab-stracted runtime environment, an application server, caching layers, integration with development tools, plus features for autoscaling and failover. That middleware, to use an old-school term, can run atop public IaaS, or be delivered to run on on-premises hardware.

Examples of true PaaS include, but are not limited to, Microsoft Azure, Engine Yard, Heroku, CloudBees and Google App Engine, Staten said. Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Elastic BeanStalk, while often touted as PaaS, doesn’t quite fit the bill.

“What Beanstalk does is take a script for how to de-ploy a complex application on IaaS, plus adds scripting for failover and scalability,” Staten said. In contrast, true PaaS does not supply scripts, but exposes components that can be called by the application, he explained.

The differences between true and pseudo PaaS are not simply academic; there are real implications for the de-veloper team. For developers who believe they’re work-ing on PaaS, “The expectation is that I write my code, I deploy it, it automatically scales and it automatically fails over,” Staten said. On a pseudo PaaS, “there’s an expec-tation miscue; the application doesn’t scale and it falls over.”

Preaching PaaS to the ChoirOrganizations that have chosen a true PaaS have done so because they can deliver production applications for

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a fraction of the cost and manpower of doing it them-selves—on-premises or on IaaS, they say.

Choose Digital in Miami offers a digital marketplace platform that customers white-label as part of loyalty and affinity programs. When the company was founded three years ago, it evaluated some early PaaS options, and found that CloudBees integrated tightly with its con-tinuous integration tools, including Jenkins test and the GitHub source repository, which enabled the firm to get its products up and running quickly.

“PaaS gave us the flexibility to be very nimble as a team, to prototype quickly—and to throw stuff away if it didn’t work,” said Mario Cruz, Choose Digital’s CTO and co-founder. It meant the company didn’t need to hire dedicated infrastructure and operations staff, and instead could focus on hiring developers.

“It’s like having a whole infrastructure team in-house, without actually having an infrastructure team,” Cruz said. Without CloudBees, he estimates that he would have had to hire eight infrastructure engineers to support the 30 applications running on the platform.

Indeed, Platform as a Service has good uptake among development organizations that need superfast time to market, said Matt Soldo, senior director of product man-agement at Heroku. A typical customer is a marketing or media firm that needs to stand up a highly scalable Web or mobile application quickly in response to an up-coming sponsorship opportunity, for example. Soldo said some customers have chosen Heroku for marketing cam-paigns during high-profile sporting events like the Super

Bowl and the New York Marathon because applications running there can scale easily.

Those apps are time-sensitive, and require “a lot of up-front capacity planning in terms of traffic simulation,” Soldo said.

PaaS is a logical choice for a technology-focused startup, but Cruz said enterprises can and should imple-ment PaaS. “You don’t need to put everything there, but you want to put 100% of your development on PaaS,” he said, including testing, staging and quality assurance. “Once you’re there, there’s no turning back.”

Not surprisingly, PaaS providers say their platforms are a good fit for most types of applications.

“Eighty percent of what you build will run better on PaaS—maybe even 95%,” said Sacha Labourey, CEO at CloudBees. That’s because the platform itself is built according to exacting best practices, and thus all apps running on top of it benefit. In contrast, most IT shops cannot honestly lay claim to providing a bullet-proof in-frastructure layer.

“ EIGHTY PERCENT OF WHAT YOU BUILD WILL RUN BETTER ON PAAS—MAYBE EVEN 95%.” —Sacha Labourey, CEO, CloudBees



“Unless you’re J.P. Morgan, the chances are that your best practices are actually just average practices,” La-bourey said.

Specifically, Forrester’s Staten said PaaS is a particu-larly good fit for some mobile apps and business process workflows, such as filling out forms.

“These are lightweight applications that don’t require a lot of complex programming, and they use a lot of reus-able components,” he said.

IT operations teams, meanwhile, benefit from their developers having access to a PaaS because it presents a single unified environment that spans development, testing, staging and production, said Bart Copeland, CEO at ActiveState, a software developer that offers a PaaS platform called Stackato that’s based on the open source Cloud Foundry.

Today, developers develop code on a desktop and then pass it along to testing. But the services that the devel-oper may have used initially may or may not be present in the testing environment, or in staging and production further down the road, he said. “There can be a lot of back and forth,” he said.

With PaaS, each member of the team has access to the same underlying services, which streamlines application development processes and minimizes the amount of time the operations team spends building and rebuilding various development environments.

“There are a lot of stories about IT and developers butting heads,” Copeland said. But with PaaS, “there’s more collaboration because IT is freed up.”

A Tough SellStill, many IT professionals in large enterprises believe that Platform as a Service is a nonstarter in their organi-zations—at least for now.

“I doubt technology groups at Comcast would want to give up control over their operating environment,” said Charles Hammell, an architect at Comcast Converged Products, a division of the Philadelphia-based telecom-munications giant that uses Amazon Web Services IaaS. “It’s been hard enough getting people on board with IaaS—that’s still a raised-eyebrow conversation.”

Further, most legacy applications simply wouldn’t work in a public PaaS, said Forrester’s Staten.

“Most enterprise apps are big, monolithic compo-nents. They just aren’t designed right,” he said. “If you try to put it on the public cloud, it’s going to fall over all day long.”

As such, Staten said enterprises shouldn’t even think about trying to port legacy applications to PaaS, but rather limit PaaS to greenfield development.

In the meantime, existing IaaS players are ratcheting up the number and type of services they offer.

“PaaS is too big of a step change for people to make incrementally. People still care about machine instances,” said Pat O’Day, CTO at BlueLock, an IaaS cloud provider. “We see demand for a sort of ‘IaaS-plus’”—IaaS plus a handful of services, such as identity management, data-base, object storage, DNS and content networking.

Amazon Web Services leads the way in terms of num-ber and scope of platform services. At last count, AWS

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BRIAN MADDEN: THE ADMIN-RIGHTS-FOR-IPADS SWAP

CAN HP, IBM AND DELL SURVIVE THE CLOUD?

CLOUD APPLICATIONS FEEL GROWING PAINS

THE JUST-IN-TIME DATA CENTER

JONATHAN EUNICE: CROSS-CUT YOUR WAY TO IT SUCCESS



offered 33 major services, CTO Werner Vogels said in his keynote at AWS Summit in New York in April, with more on the way. Those services run from the mundane (load balancing and storage) to the exotic, for instance Amazon RedShift, a petabyte-scale data warehouse ser-vice, and Amazon Elastic Transcoder, for scalable media transcoding.

Other IaaS vendors are trying to follow in those foot-steps. In April, for instance, Rackspace Hosting added mobile cloud stacks to its cloud offerings to speed mobile application delivery, and it acquired Exceptional Cloud Services for its error tracking and its as-a-Service version of Redis, the open source key value store. Sooner rather than later, every legitimate IaaS provider will offer a whole lot more than bare-bones infrastructure resources, infringing on the value proposition that a pure-play PaaS provider tries to offer.

The Case for Private PaaSMeanwhile, concerns surrounding security and gover-nance are prompting some PaaS players to offer their wares on private infrastructure, not just the public cloud.

“Whether it’s for data sovereignty or governance rea-sons, some of our customers tell us PaaS must be behind their firewall,” said ActiveState’s Copeland. “They say, ‘There’s no way we’re putting our data on the public cloud,’” he said.

Implementing PaaS in-house can also lay the ground-work for future use of public PaaS, he said. Hewlett-Pack-ard used ActiveState Stackato in-house, and decided to

offer it as a service running on top of OpenStack, cur-rently in beta. “That provides us with a common infra-structure stack that we can deploy on both public and private platforms,” said Dan Baigent, HP Cloud Services senior director for business development.

Even if public PaaS is not an option for an

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BRIAN MADDEN: THE ADMIN-RIGHTS-FOR-IPADS SWAP

CAN HP, IBM AND DELL SURVIVE THE CLOUD?

CLOUD APPLICATIONS FEEL GROWING PAINS

THE JUST-IN-TIME DATA CENTER

JONATHAN EUNICE: CROSS-CUT YOUR WAY TO IT SUCCESS

PaaS Platform RootsMANY PaaS PLATFORMS have their roots in a specific

programming language. Over time, most PaaS

vendors have moved beyond a single language

and claim to be “polyglot,” supporting multiple

languages. Nevertheless, their heritage is worth

bearing in mind, as it may help inform your choice

of which one best fits your environment. Here is

an incomplete list of PaaS players and the original

development environment for which they were

designed.

AppFog — PHP

CloudBees — Java

Cloud Foundry — Ruby on Rails

Engine Yard — Ruby on Rails, PHP

Google App Engine — Python

Heroku — Ruby on Rails

Microsoft Windows Azure — .NET

—ALEX BARRETT

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organization, offering a private version lets IT opera-tions teams provide developers with greater agility and self-service, while still being simpler to manage than a traditional development environment, said Chris Turra, a Web operations engineer at Mozilla, the nonprofit Web development organization behind, among other things, the Firefox browser.

After experimenting with the open source Cloud Foundry, Mozilla settled on Stackato. Compared with managing a non-PaaS development environment, Turra said this is much easier. “You don’t have to manage in-dividual nodes per se—rather services that allow other nodes to be set up,” he said. “There are some things that you have to wrap your brain around initially,” he said, but

once you get over that, “it’s quite trivial to set up.”Overall, implementing a PaaS supports the operations’

team mission, Turra said. “We want to be platform engi-neers. We want to enable developers to work at a faster velocity, and never get in their way.”

One PaaS vendor offering private PaaS implementa-tions is Engine Yard.

Building an in-house PaaS not only speeds develop-ment but also serves other uses, said Forrester’s Staten, namely the reverse—helping to bring public cloud deployed applications back in-house, and helping op-erations teams manage integration points between the public cloud and the private data center. To that point, “We’re not expecting a huge number of private PaaS—most will be a hybrid,” Staten said.

And even if offering PaaS services makes sense for your organization, don’t get too caught up in the hype. For all its faults and foibles, IaaS dwarfs the PaaS market and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, Staten said. “Plan on adding PaaS to your private and public cloud portfolio, but not as a replacement for Infra-structure as a Service—rather, as a complement.” n

ALEX BARRETT is the editor in chief of Modern Infrastructure.

“ WE’RE NOT EXPECTING A HUGE NUMBER OF PRIVATE PAAS—MOST WILL BE A HYBRID.” —James Staten, analyst, Forrester Research Inc.


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With the explosion of mobile devices serving a burgeoning email user base, organizations must take a hard look at how they deliver messaging to users. Hosted email gets plenty of press, but many companies are hesitant to yank their deeply rooted on-premises email systems, and adoption of hosted email has proven slow.

A case against a move to hosted mail can certainly be made. Many companies are entrenched in their ways and don’t want to take risks by outsourcing their email to an-other vendor. Security and availability are also concerns. However, some areas that are considered weaknesses can actually prove to be strengths when it comes to hosted email.

What’s Driving Hosted Email Migrations?The benefits of online email systems for IT shops are driven home by the relentless marketing and deep

HOSTED EMAIL SETUPS WORTH A LOOKAs enterprises start trusting the cloud for their email, on-premises Exchange is no longer a given.

HOSTED EMAIL | MATT GERVAIS AND ED SCANNELL

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pockets of the two titans in this market: Microsoft, with its Office 365 suite, and Google, with Google Apps. Though their combined market share certainly dwarfs that of smaller vendors, the press they receive only fur-thers interest in moving a company’s email off-premises.

But just because the two email behemoths say they’re gaining new customers and that the cloud is the way to go, IT shops need real reasons to make that move.

One reason for moving to cloud-based email systems is that many organizations have steadily implemented cloud-based technologies to circumvent the restrictive networking policies of their own IT departments.

“Users have jumped out to cloud solutions just to get their jobs done for a long time now. They see Gmail and Hotmail used to send large attachments, and [IT staffs] are looking for ways to stop that,” said Orlando Scott-Cowley, a messaging security and compliance ex-pert at Mimecast in London. “That often means turning to the cloud; it is offering the most innovation to enable users—and the business.”

Platform upgrades often inspire IT pros to consider moving their on-premises email systems into the cloud, according to IT consultants. When an Exchange Server deployment, for example, comes to its end-of-life cycle, IT shops historically re-evaluate their email strategy. During that process, shops must determine whether they will upgrade an on-premises deployment, move forward without support or move to hosted email.

“This is the perfect time to take a step back and figure out your overall email strategy,” said Scott-Cowley. “With

the popularity of cloud in general, email is an easy entry point.”

The decision often comes down to expense, from both capital and resource standpoints.

IT consultants point to the popularity of hosted email in smaller companies. Those businesses often can’t afford a full-time administrator for on-premises email. It may make more sense to have individuals and companies with messaging expertise do the work for them.

“With hosted email, the company can actually gener-ate more revenue,” said Tri Nguyen, a senior manager of product management at Dell. “They don’t have to spend time offering IT services.”

In the case of larger businesses, the appeal of hosted email systems is that they can allow for delivery of both existing and new services, but with less financial overhead. In addition, hosted email frees up more IT resources that can be refocused on other systems.

“Just reducing the overhead on the email platform

“ WITH THE POPULARITY OF CLOUD IN GENERAL, EMAIL IS AN EASY ENTRY POINT.” —Orlando Scott-Cowley, messaging security and compliance expert, Mimecast

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side—while giving the same or higher-level capabili-ties—might mean the difference between completing and not completing a few projects this year,” said Mounil Patel, director of professional services at Mimecast.

Hosted Email: Weighing the Pros and ConsWhile there are congregations of cloud evangelists, there are just as many skeptics. The latter point to outages of Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps and competitors’ hosted online email systems as one reason why IT shops shouldn’t rely on these systems. Certainly, when a mis-sion-critical app like email goes down, it severely limits most companies’ ability to function.

“If you lose your email capability, your business is closed until it comes back up,” said Mike Drips, a senior architect at Wipro, an IT consulting and outsourcing firm. “Providers have to give you a whole lot of nines of uptime to make you feel confident.”

There’s no running from the fact that Google and Mi-crosoft Office 365 have experienced several outages over the past few years, but email downtime has always been inevitable, whether on- or off-premises. If an on-prem-ises email setup goes down, however, a company doesn’t get money back on its investment. Microsoft offers a 25% credit each time Office 365 has an outage, and some hosted email vendors offer up to a 100% credit if their services go down.

Anxiety also persists over security and an outside com-pany owning enterprise data. However, companies that

rely on in-house email are actually more susceptible to rogue employees making off with data.

“People need to face the fact that just because [the disk] is sitting next to them, it doesn’t make it more se-cure,” said Oliver Moazzezi, a technical architect at Cob-web Solutions in the United Kingdom.

Moazzezi also pointed out that hosted providers must

WHICH HOSTED EMAIL?BEFORE DECIDING which hosted email is best for

your company, be sure to answer the following

questions:

1. Which users do we want in the cloud, and

which ones do we need to hold back for compli-

ance reasons?

2. Does this provider allow us to use the crucial

applications we’ve relied on for years? Can

they meet our current functionality?

3. What sort of user training does this provider

offer?

4. How is the provider’s customer support?

5. What sort of value-adds does the provider

offer? For example, if you sign on for hosted

email, can it also offer SharePoint at a dis-

counted rate or even for free?

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prove via service-level agreements that they have in-vested in surveillance cameras, require smart cards to access various parts of their data centers, and offer data encryption and two-factor authentication. And these measures may be just the tip of the security iceberg. At the very least, an outside hosting company should offer most of these capabilities.

Administrators Must Evolve TooMany forward-thinking IT admins suggested to upper management long ago that hosted email is at least worth a look, but some administrators fear that the cloud could make their jobs redundant. This fear has waned over time, but it still persists. A move to the cloud could re-lieve admins of typical day-to-day duties, and it could give them time to address more important, big-picture issues, as opposed to putting out fires.

For instance, instead of focusing on only messaging, administrators working in an environment with hosted email would have the luxury of time to strategize. They

could examine how to integrate new technologies, such as the voice and presence capabilities in a product like Microsoft’s Lync, or more advanced collaboration abili-ties, such as those in Microsoft’s SharePoint.

A move to hosted email must not be taken lightly. Many still see it as a risky venture, but others see it as an opportunity to advance the business. Make sure that you have enough pros and that you don’t get conned before committing precious time and effort toward such a stra-tegically important project. n

MATT GERVAIS is site editor for SearchExchange.com. Contact him at [email protected]. ED SCANNELL is senior executive editor of the Data Center and Virtualization group at TechTarget.

SOME ADMINISTRATORS FEAR THAT THE CLOUD COULDMAKE THEIR JOBS REDUNDANT.

mailto:[email protected]


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Over the past decade, compute power has increased nearly 30-fold and networks have increased in speed roughly 100-fold. During that time, hard disk drive (HDD) technology has not significantly increased in ei-ther rotational speed or total through-put. Adding a solid-state drive (SSD) tier to an HDD array is like adding a turbocharger to a car engine. But adding an all-SSD array? That’s like replacing it with a jet engine.

In today’s data center, storage technology can easily lag behind other, faster systems. A 35% storage utiliza-tion rate (as measured by the storage consumed, not allocated) isn’t uncommon—and IT managers faced with that number will likely conclude that they have a prob-lem with underutilized capacity. And they’re right. On

USING ALL-SSD ARRAYS TO MEGA-CHARGE YOUR DATA CENTERHard drives haven’t kept up with increasing workload demands. Could SSD arrays be the answer?

DATA CENTER STORAGE | PHIL GOODWIN

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a multimillion-dollar array, this can be a million-dollar problem.

Should these organizations simply pack more data into the space available? Maybe not. The root cause of this ca-pacity inefficiency may be performance. Adding more ca-pacity to a storage array increases available performance, as measured by IOPS (I/O operations per second), so storage sizing considerations have to include both capac-ity and performance. And when comparing the merits of HDD versus SSD arrays, IOPS is a key measurement.

The All-Important IOPS Solid-state disk has introduced a whole new level of performance to storage systems, and IOPS per GB is a useful ratio for IT managers to consider. Enterprise-class SSD can deliver approximately 100 IOPS/GB, which rep-resents more than 220 times more IOPS/GB than a 400 GB HDD.

But one barrier to SSD adoption has been the per-ceived high cost. However, while higher-capacity drives deliver lower cost per gigabyte, they also have lower IOPS per gigabyte. Array-based SSD can cost up to $40 per gigabyte, while enterprise serial-attached SCSI (SAS) hard drives cost about $5 per gigabyte. SSD storage offers 2.5 IOPS per dollar, whereas a 400 GB HDD offers just .15 IOPS per dollar. That translates to 16 times more per-formance per dollar spent.

The cost per gigabyte of all-SSD arrays may not be shocking; Nimbus Data Systems Inc. sells its all-SSD technology for about $8 to $10 per gigabyte, for example.

This price point makes all-SSD very viable for specific workloads.

And a small slice of SSD can make a huge difference in an array’s IOPS potential. For example, adding 2 tera-bytes (TB) of SSD to a 100 TB array—a 2% increase—could yield nearly 30% more performance potential. SSD may be expensive on a capacity basis, but it is remarkably cost-effective on a performance basis.


HDD vs. SSDHDD SSD

PR

OS

• Low cost per

gigabyte stored

• No vulnerability to

write wear

• Mature management

tools

• Low cost per IOPS

delivered

• Up to 80% lower

environmental cost

• No moving parts to

wear out

• Small form factor

relative to capacity

CO

NS

• Low IOPS/GB

• Uses considerable

space, power and

cooling

• Could become a

siloed system

• Higher Capex

• Limited write life

• Management tools

may be limited

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Enterprises have been adding SSD to their arrays during recent years, boosting performance of HDD ar-rays with economically feasible amounts of solid-state capacity. But prices have dropped enough as of late to warrant forgoing HDD altogether for a certain subset of applications.

Database acceleration is a common use case for an all-SSD array. This may be particularly attractive for online transaction processing (OLTP) applications where either sustained or bursty I/O activity may exceed the capac-ity of HDDs to perform. Another favorable workload is virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), where a small SSD footprint can serve a very large number of devices with consistent speed. A third workload is large-scale

server virtualization. The random nature of data access by such a large number of servers into a single storage device might normally require frequent physical hits to the HDD rather than cache. All-SSD obviates the need for slow access to spinning disk. Perhaps the most inter-esting emerging use case is big data analytics. SSD arrays can deliver enough performance to do real-time analysis on very large quantities of data.

The All-SSD MarketplaceThe all-SSD market is just getting interesting. Like most new market segments, this one features independent, emerging vendors going toe-to-toe with established ven-dors where the battle is over best-in-class functionality

SSD Arrays: Crunching the NumbersI/O PER SECOND (IOPS) per gigabyte (GB) —IOPS/GB—is a key measurement when looking at storage technol-

ogy. Consider that a RAID group with four 400 GB 15 K SAS drives would yield approximately 700 raw IOPS

(175 per drive). If an application required 900 IOPS, it would be necessary to add two drives to that RAID

group to provide adequate application performance. However, one could not add more data to the RAID

group at the same time, because presumably the additional data would require more IOPS to serve it.

In terms of IOPS, 400 GB and 600 GB 15 K SAS drives yield the same raw IOPS. So, a 400 GB HDD has .4376

IOPS/GB, whereas as a 600 GB HDD has .2917 IOPS/GB. While higher-capacity drives deliver a lower cost

per gigabyte, they also have lower IOPS per gigabyte. Of course, this is a vast oversimplification

of HDD performance, but the complexities are not critical here. The important concept is that IOPS

are necessarily tied to capacity. Result: better performance, less efficiency.

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more than vendor name or reputation. Nimbus Data Sys-tems and SolidFire are emerging vendors, for example, while Hewlett-Packard Co. and EMC Corp. are two of the established vendors competing in this rapidly expanding category.

Nimbus was one of the early evangelists for all-SSD arrays. Its E-class arrays can have up to 500 TB in total capacity. Nimbus claims to deliver 800,000 IOPS in a 2U enclosure with an 80% reduction in power and cooling compared with the same HDD capacity.

SolidFire touts its guaranteed quality of service (QoS) as a key differentiator. In this case, QoS is described as accurately allocating the right capacity for a specific ap-plication. This means striping the data across all available SSDs in the system. Basically, the company recommends provisioning based on required IOPS, not capacity. Based on the required minimum, maximum and burst IOPS for an application, the allocation will be made to meet the minimum service-level agreement (SLA).

Among established vendors, HP is taking a fully inte-grated approach to its SSD product strategy. That is, HP 3PAR StoreServ 10000 systems can be configured for all-SSD with up to about 100 TB. The 10000 can be further provisioned with HDDs up to a capacity of 2.2 petabytes (PB). The advantage that HP brings is that the all-SSD configuration is simply an extension of the 3PAR product line with all the associated features, functionality and manageability.

EMC has taken a different route to market with its acquisition of XtremIO in 2012. The XtremeIO array

architecture was designed for solid state from the ground up, including the controllers. The company claims that the storage can be deployed in minutes without tuning or striping. XtremeIO arrays are currently in limited avail-ability with general availability scheduled for later in 2013.

All-SSD Array Features and FunctionsOrganizations will find that adding all-SSD products to the data center can be done nondisruptively, since the concept of the storage deployment is very similar to that of an all-HDD product. It has the same basic logical unit number (LUN), RAID and other considerations. Most vendors will support typical RAID levels for SSD.

Vendors will recommend a certain amount of space reservation for “garbage collection,” a process needed after a certain number of write operations. This is be-cause SSD does not overwrite blocks directly. Rather, it writes to an available block and later erases the obsolete block for reuse. Each vendor will have different specific recommendations on RAID and garbage collection over-head, but figure 20% to 30% on most systems (though XtremeIO claims that its method of garbage collection at the controller level reduces that overhead reserve).

Other common features in SSD arrays are those that are currently “table stakes” in the larger array markets. These include thin provisioning, deduplication and the like.

Management varies with all-SSD products. HP 3PAR is managed by the 3PAR management software suite. Other products will be more system-specific, such as

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Nimbus’s HALO software. HALO is a combination OS and management suite for monitoring and managing the arrays. HALO does not currently interface directly with higher-order management consoles such as Tivoli or HP OpenView, but the company does provide a REST appli-cation programming interface (API).

Deploying All-SSD ArraysMost organizations will get started in all-SSD at the point of new application deployment. A typical configuration is 20 TB to 30 TB, so in the scheme of a data center these are not enormous deployments. Most organizations can expect to have no more than 10% of their total capacity in SSD, as the fact remains that most data does not re-quire flash-level performance.

One of the big dings to SSD technology is that it does predictably wear out. The individual storage cells are good for only so many writes before they are no longer usable. Gradually, the capacity of the drive diminishes to the point that it must be replaced. In the case of consum-er-grade SSD, known as multi-level cell (MLC) technol-ogy and typically found in PCs, the cell life is only about 10,000 write operations. Enterprise-class SSD, known as single-level cell (SLC) technology, is good for about 100,000 write operations.

Application data demands are only increasing, which points to a future where all-SSD is a standard part of the data center architecture. n

PHIL GOODWIN is a storage consultant and freelance writer.

0

10

20

30

40

50

6%

Objectstorage

20%

Scale-outNAS

22%

Storage for virtualdesktops

23%

Solid-state

storage

25%

Storagefor big

data

25%

Cloudstorage

39%

Datareductionin primary

storage

45%

Storage virtualization

Which of these primary storage initiatives will your company deploy

this year?

SOURCE: 2013 IT PRIORITIES SURVEY


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Teaching the Data Center to Fetch

As I’ve been thinking about cloud computing, public and private, the concept of the “long tail” keeps coming up. That term describes a business model that sells few, but unique items, rather than many identical items. The idea is based on the Pareto distribution, which when graphed starts high on the left and tapers off into a dis-tinct tail at the right. Long-tail proponents argue that the total sales within the tail in an industry can meet or exceed the sales potential of the newest, most popular items. To me, this sounds precisely like the future of the on-premises data center.

It is fairly common to hear people heralding the death of the data center at the hands of public clouds. Software as a Service (SaaS) will eliminate whole chunks of our data center’s workload outright. Platform as a Service (PaaS) will take our custom applications and run them

in places where we don’t have to worry about common yet esoteric things, like tuning Java heap sizes. And Infra-structure as a Service (IaaS) is the final nail in the coffin, allowing us to simply move our legacy applications some-where else.

The Data Center’s Long TailAll these services are compelling in certain ways, espe-cially when they address a big organizational problem, such as running out of physical space or a rebellion against terrible traditional enterprise software. They’re also compelling when an organization’s IT staff isn’t particularly skilled in certain areas. Yet the appeal of a private cloud, or no cloud at all, running from a local data center is as strong as ever. This is the long tail on the sales of computing technology, and I wonder if it’s large enough to, pardon the expression, wag the dog.

Why is there a tail at all? First, there are big issues—lock-in, pricing and connectivity—that worry IT staff. How do you get your data out of an application hosted somewhere on the Internet when you find something better? If you’ve written a custom application against the Google App Engine application programming interfaces, how do you move it when the vendor’s pricing, terms or services become unfavorable? With pricing, just as it’s cheaper to buy a car than rent it for five years, many

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IN THE MIX | BOB PLANKERS

organizations have the sorts of workloads that are fairly constant. For them, buying is often a better choice than renting.

The biggest issue, though, is that you hear of the jour-ney to the cloud most often from large businesses. And while many small- and medium-sized businesses might use Gmail or Office 365, they see any more cloud as un-necessary overhead. They don’t need more IT process, they don’t need self-service, and they’re about as consoli-dated as they’ll ever be now that they’re virtualized. They may not even need a data center, perhaps with a couple of racks tucked away on their manufacturing floor, the financials of which are just as favorable as cloud comput-ing—at least for them.

This is the long, happily wagging tail of IT, and it’ll be around for a long time. n

BOB PLANKERS is a virtualization and cloud architect at a major Mid-western university. He is also the author of The Lone Sysadmin blog.

Modern Infrastructure is a SearchDataCenter.com e-publication.

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COVER PHOTOGRAPH: ISTOCKPHOTO

WHILE MANY SMALL- AND MEDIUM-SIZED BUSINESSES MIGHT USE GMAIL OR OFFICE 365, THEY SEE ANY MORE CLOUD AS UNNECES-SARY OVERHEAD.

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