VMworld, Red Hat Summit news takes cloud computing beyond the hype curve

Three industry conferences this week -- one underlying theme: enterprise cloud computing.

If you could sum up VMworld 2009, the Red Hat Summit and JBoss World with one uber topic, cloud takes it -- which begs whether the cloud hype curve has yet peaked.

Or more compelling yet, is the interest in cloud models more than just hype, more than a knee-jerk reaction to selling IT wares in a recession, more than an evolutionary step in the progression of networked computing?

Although the slew of announcements coming out of San Francisco and Chicago this week weren’t solely focused on the cloud, the pattern is unmistakable and could cause naysayers to think again.

It all started with VMworld on Monday. Dell and VMware took the stage to announce an expansion of their existing partnership where Dell will bundle VMware View as an option on some of its server and client platforms. The result: an end-to-end solution from the desktop to the data center as a foundation for cloud computing.

HP wouldn’t be excluded from the VMware announcement fray. VMware and HP took the cover off a solution that lets enterprises manage both physical and virtual infrastructures through the VMware vCenter console. The new HP Insight Control for VMware vCenter Server took center stage at the conference with a focus on tighter integration, simpler user experiences and greater control within virtualized environments. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Ones to Watch

In other cloud news, virtual machine management solutions firm VMLogix announced its LabManager Cloud Edition at VMworld. The LabManager Cloud Edition that lets software teams run virtual labs on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Meanwhile, Zoho inked a deal with VMware to deliver private cloud software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions for enterprise customers. F5 hooked up with VMware to make a way for companies to securely migrate to and from public or private clouds with no downtime or interruption. And 1,000-plus service providers – including AT&T, Verizon, and Terremark – are going to offer cloud services based on VMware’s Cloud OS.

Some newer names made some major announcements at VMworld. Virtustream announced it has raised $25 million in equity financing, validating the firm as a player in the enterprise cloud market with its strategy, integration and managed services offerings. And Mellanox Technologies and Intalio are ones to watch. The Intalio|Cloud Appliance, accelerated by Mellanox 40Gb/s Infiniband, won the Best of VMworld 2009 award in the Cloud Computing Technologies category.

Reviewing the Red Hat Summit

Even as the cloud-oriented stories continue to emerge from VMworld 2009, we’re seeing some interesting cloud headlines coming out of the Red Hat Summit in Chicago, too. For the first time, Red Hat hosted the Summit and JBoss World together. But let’s take the news one at a time.

Perhaps the biggest Summit news on the cloud front is Red Hat and HP expanding their collaboration to drive the next generation of converged server, storage and networking infrastructure solutions. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 is now available on HP BladeSystem and HP ProLiant servers. The idea is to drive customers to virtualization and cloud computing.

Jumping into JBoss World

Red Hat also delivered on its JBoss Open Choice strategy during the Summit. The JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5.0 is now available. It represents the next generation Java platforms and will play a central role in Red Hat’s cloud foundation. This is significant because the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform is the first commercially available Java EE application server available in Amazon's EC2.

Ingres sent a clear message that building open source Java applications in the cloud offers companies opportunities to lower costs without losing scalability or robustness. Suggesting that social networking platforms have become a new platform for developers to launch products and services, Ingres offered a look at how to use open source technologies on Facebook.

And on the entertainment front, DreamWorks Animations discussed how the company has leveraged cloud computing technologies to product films like Antz, Shrek2 and Madagascar, partnering with RedHat and its open source technologies.

The cloud topic still remains too amorphous and enterprises are only beginning to grapple with how to move to cloud adoption in ways that support their goals. But, riding the wave of virtualization and SOA adoption, both vendors and IT architects are treating cloud computing as far ore than a passing fancy.

Many of the concepts first proposed and extolled during the Internet hype curve in the mid-1990s are now bearing fruit. Perhaps we should think of cloud computing as less than a separate hype curve, and more as the realization of the original Internet value curve , now some 15 years into its mainstream maturity.

(BriefingsDirect contributor Jennifer LeClaire provided editorial assistance and research on this post. She can be reached at http://www.linkedin.com/in/jleclaire and http://www.jenniferleclaire.com.)

Proper cloud adoption requires a governance support spectrum of technology, services, best practices

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View a free e-book on HP SaaS and learn more about cost-effective IT management as a service.

It's hard to over-estimate the importance of performance monitoring and governance in any move to cloud computing.

Yet most analysts expect cloud computing to become a rapidly growing affair. That is, infrastructure, data, applications, and even management itself, originating as services from different data centers, under different control, and perhaps different ownership.

What then becomes essential in effectively moving to cloud adoption is proper cross-organizational governance. There needs to be a holistic embrace of such governance -- with a full spectrum of technologies, services, best practices, and hosting options guidance -- to manage the complexity and relationships.

The governance strength will likely determine if enterprises can actually harvest the expected efficiencies and benefits that cloud computing portends. [UPDATE: More cloud activities are spreading across the "private-public" divide, as VMware announced this week, upping the need for governance ante.]

To learn more on accomplishing such visibility and governance at scale and in a way that meets enterprise IT and regulatory compliance needs, I recently interviewed two executives from Hewlett-Packard's (HP's) Software and Solutions Group, Scott Kupor, former vice president and general manager of HP's software as a service (SaaS) operations, and Anand Eswaran, vice president of Professional Services.

Here are some excerpts:

Kupor: You hear people use lots of terms today about infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), or SaaS. Our idea is that all these things ultimately are variants of cloud-based environments. ... So lots of customers are looking at things like Amazon EC2 or Microsoft's Azure as environments in which they might want to deploy an application.

But when you put your application out there you still care about how that application is going to perform. Is it going to be secure? What does it look like from an overall management and governance perspective? That's where, in that specific example, Cloud Assure can be very helpful, because essentially it provides that trust, governance, and audit of that application in a cloud-based environment.

Eswaran: If you look at today's IT environments, we hear of 79-85 percent of costs being spent on managing current applications versus the focus on innovation. What cloud does is basically take away the focus on maintenance and on just keeping the lights on.

When you view it from that perspective, the people who are bothered about, worried about, or excited about the cloud span the whole gamut. It goes from the CIO, who is looking at it from value -- how can I create value for my business and get back to innovation to make IT a differentiator for the business -- all the way down to people in the IT organization.

These are the apps leaders, the operations leaders, the enterprise architects, all of them viewing the cloud as a key way to transform their core job responsibilities from keeping the lights on to innovation.

In the context of that, cloud is going to be one of the principal enablers, where the customer or the organization can forget about technology so much, focus on their core business, and leverage the cloud to consume a service, which enables them to innovate in the core business in which they operate.

Once the IT organization is free to think about innovation, to think about

The whole focus shifts, and that is the key. At the heart of it, this allows organizations to compete in the marketplace better.

what cutting edge services can they provide to the business, the focus then transforms from “how can I use technology to keep the lights on,” to “how can I use technology to be a market differentiator, to allow my organization to compete better in the marketplace.”

So given that, now the business user is going to see a lot better response times, and they are going to see a lot of proactive IT participation, allowing them to effectively manage their business better. The whole focus shifts, and that is the key. At the heart of it, this allows organizations to compete in the marketplace better.

Kupor: This is really what's interesting to us about cloud. We're seeing demand for cloud being driven by line-of-business owners today. You have a lot of line-of-business owners who are saying, "I need to roll out a new application, but I know that my corporate IT is constrained by either headcount constraints or other things in this environment, in particular."

We're seeing a lot of experimentation, particularly with a lot of our enterprise customers, from line-of-business owners essentially looking toward public clouds as a way for them to accelerate, to Anand's point, innovation and adoption of potentially new applications that might have otherwise taken too long or not been prioritized appropriately by the internal IT departments.

... The thing that people are worried about from an IT perspective in cloud is that they've lost some element of control over the application. ... In cloud now, what you've done is you've disintermediated the IT administrator from the application itself by having him access that environment publicly.

Things like performance now become critically important, as well as availability of the application, security, and how I manage data associated with those applications. None of those is a new problem. Those are all same problems that existed inside the firewall, but now we've complicated that relationship by introducing a third-party with whom the actual infrastructure for the application tends to reside.

Eswaran: What the cloud does is get you back to thinking about a shared service for the entire organization. Whether you think of shared service at an organizational level, which is where you start thinking about elements like the private cloud, or you think about shared applications, which are offered as a service in a publicly available domain including the cloud, it just starts to create exactly the word Scott used, a sense of disintermediation and a loss of control.

... HP Software has traditionally been a management vendor.

. . . we've taken all of that knowledge and expertise that we've been working on for companies inside the firewall and have given those companies an opportunity to effectively point that expertise at an application that now lives in a third-party cloud environment.

Historically, most of our customers have been managing applications that live inside the firewall. They care about things like performance availability and systems management.

What we've done with Cloud Assure is we've taken all of that knowledge and expertise that we've been working on for companies inside the firewall and have given those companies an opportunity to effectively point that expertise at an application that now lives in a third-party cloud environment.

... As a service, we can point that set of tests against an application running in an external environment and ensure the service levels associated with that application, just as they would do if that application were running inside their firewall. It gives them that holistic service-level management, independent of the physical environment, whether it's a cloud or non-cloud the application is running in.

Kupor: We don't expect customers to throw out existing implementations of successfully developed and running applications. What we do think that will happen over time is that we will live in kind of this mixed environment. So, just as today customers still have mainframe environments that have been around for many years, as well as client-server deployments, we think we will see cloud application start to migrate over time, but ultimately live in the concept of mixed environments.

... From an opinion point of view, we expect cloud to be a very big inflection point in technology. We think it's powerful enough to probably be the second, after what we saw with the Internet as an inflection point.

This is not just one more technology fad, according to us. We've talked about one concept, which is going to be the biggest business driver. It's utility-based computing, which is the ability for organizations to pay based on demand for computing resources, much like you pay for the utility industry.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. View a full transcript or download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

View a free e-book on HP SaaS and learn more about cost-effective IT management as a service.

XDAS standard aims to empower IT audit trails from across complex events, perhaps clouds

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Welcome to the latest BriefingsDirect podcast discussion, recorded at The Open Group’s 23rd Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference and the associated 3rd Security Practitioners Conference in Toronto.

We're going to take a look at an emerging updated standard called XDAS, which looks at audit trail information from a variety of systems and software across the enterprise IT environment.

This is an emerging standard that’s being orchestrated through The Open Group, but it’s an open-source standard that is hopefully going to help in compliance and regulatory issues and in improving automation of events across heterogeneous environments. This could be increasingly important, as we get deeper into virtualization and cloud computing.

Here to help us drill into XDAS (see a demo now), we're joined by Ian Dobson, director of the Security Forum for The Open Group, as well as Joël Winteregg, CEO and co-founder of NetGuardians. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Dobson: We actually got involved way back in '90s, in 1998, when we published the Distributed Audit Service (XDAS) Standard. It was, in many ways, ahead of its time, but it was a distributed audit services standard. Today’s audit and logging requirements are much more demanding than they were then. There is a heightened awareness of everything to do with audit and logging, and we see a need now to update it to meet today’s needs. So that’s why we've got involved now.

A key part of this is event reporting. Event reports have all sorts of formats today, but that makes them difficult to consume. Of course, we then generate events so that they can be consumed in useful ways. So, we're aiming the new audit standard from XDAS to be something that defines an interoperable event-reporting format, so that they can be consumed equally by everybody who needs to know.

The XDAS standard developers are well aware of, and closely involved in, the related Common Event Expression (CEE) standard development activity in Mitre. Mitre's CEE standard has a broader scope than XDAS, and XDAS will fit very well into the Event Reporting Format part of CEE.

We are therefore also participating in the CEE standard development to achieve this and more, so as to deliver to the audit and logging community an authoritative single open standard that they can adopt with confidence.

Winteregg: My company is working in the area of audit event management. We saw that it was a big issue to collect all these different audit trails from each different IT environment.

We saw that, if it was possible to have a single and standard way to represent all this information, that would be much easier and relevant for IT user and for a security officer to analyze all this information, in order to find out what the exact issues are, and to troubleshoot issue in the infrastructure, and so on. That’s a good basis for understanding what's going on the whole infrastructure in the company.

There is no uniform way to represent this information, and we thought that this initiative would be really good, because it will bring something uniform and universal that will help all the IT users to understand what is going on.

In distributed environments, it's really hard to track a transaction, because it starts on a specific component, then it goes through another one, and to a cloud. You don’t know exactly where everything is happening. So, the only way to track these transactions or to track the accountability in such an environment would be through some transaction identifiers, and so on.

For auditors or administrator, it is really costly to understand this information and use it

You will be able to track the who, the what, and the when in the whole IT infrastructure, which is really important these days . . .

in order to get relevant information for management to have metrics and to understand what's really happening on the IT infrastructure.

Audit information deals a lot with the accountability of the different transactions in an enterprise IT infrastructure. The real logs, which are modulated to develop strong meaning for debugging applications, may be providing the size of buffers or parameters of an application. Audit trails are much more business oriented. That means that you will have a lot of accountability information. You will be able to track the who, the what, and the when in the whole IT infrastructure, which is really important these days with all these different regulations, like Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) and the others.

With a standard like XDAS, it will be much easier for a company to be in compliance with regulations, because there will be really clear and specific interfaces from all the different vendors to these generated audit trails.

The standard will be open, but there is a Java implementation of that standard called XDAS for J, which is a Java Library. This implementation is open source and business friendly. That means that you can use it in some proprietary software without having to then provide your software as an open-source software. So, it is available for business software too, and all the code is open. You can modify it, look at it, and so on. It’s on the Codehaus platform.

We're waiting for some feedback from vendors and users about how it is easy to use, how helpful it is, and if there are maybe some use cases -- if the scope is too wide, too narrow, etc. We're open to every comment about the current standard.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. View a full transcript or download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: The Open Group.