Vail Resorts' EpicMix shows the right CIO *can* help deliver business innovation

Today I published a new blog post on CA.com in the ‘Perspectives’ section of our community site – you can see the whole blog here.

In this post, I discuss whether the CIO role is dead – and if it isn’t what you can do to make sure it not only survives, but drives business value …

I keep hearing how cloud computing will kill the CIO. Articles, posts, and tweets claim “the CIO is dead,” done in by SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, virtualization, and the increasing commoditization of IT resources. IT budgets are being cut (again!), but IT spending overall is going up, according to both IDC and Gartner. So some organizations are now wondering whether they even need a CIO.

Please click here to read the whole blog in the ‘Perspectives’ section of the CA Technologies community site.

Conducting an orchestra is easy; delivering a new CRM service is hard!

A long time ago, someone asked me on Twitter what is the difference between automation and orchestration. It really got me thinking, and eventually I think I answered by using an actual musical orchestra as a metaphor.

In this metaphor, having an autonomous musician play the entire violin part of a symphony is somewhat akin to typical automation – lots of activity and complex interactions all handled without external intervention, but all within a reasonably tight sphere of influence, in large part unconnected with the rest of the orchestra.

In this case, as long as all your automation is well synchronized, then the symphony sounds at least listenable. However, whenever anything goes awry – a string breaks, a bow is dropped – then all of a sudden that instrument is out of time, and the symphony turns into cacophony.

Then there is orchestration, where the complex parts for all the individual instruments are all played individually, but they are further connected to a whole orchestra of other instruments to create a more complete experience. Orchestration can handle greater volume and scale, it is more informed about the musical piece as a whole, rather than just each individual part.

In this case, when something goes wrong, a well-conducted orchestra understands what it means to the larger composition, and can perhaps make adjustments in real time to smooth out any issues (get the other strings to play more forte to compensate for the missing violin, for example).

Yes, it is far from a perfect metaphor, but it still works for me, more or less.

Reading a recent article by Mark Chillingworth (@mchillingworth) in CIO magazine UK, titled Private cloud computing is just a component CIOs say, got me thinking about this metaphor some more. I found the following comment particularly interesting:

A CIO used the example of a customer following an ecommerce transaction with a retailer. The customer will, during the process, actually move across different applications, secure hosted transaction services, logistics, catalogue sites and search engines. The user is rarely aware or cares that they are shifting from application to application, hosted or non-hosted; the experience always feels the same.

This CIO believes that the principals of private cloud computing will be integrated into complex business processes in much the same way to increase organisational efficiency, reduce the number of applications organisations support and improve user experience.

He described the CIO’s role in this new model as that of orchestration of services.

This is a fascinating analogy, and one well worth considering. In most places there is way too much focus from the IT department and its leaders on the technologies, and not nearly enough on the outcomes. From this customer perspective, they really do not care where or how the service they need is delivered; they only care that they get want they want.

In the symphonic metaphor, the customer is the audience, listening to the symphony, occasionally aware but not overly concerned about what player is playing what line, but mainly concerned with hearing the whole composition. Of course, if any one member of the orchestra has problems – a broken bow, a detuned string – then the customer becomes acutely aware – and dissatisfied.

The article also put forward the following comment, which keeps aligning to my theme:

More than one attendee saw the CIO … reflect the same business model as an HR department. Just as HR no longer carries out the provision of staff, but does provide the governance, CIOs will follow the same course, allowing self-provision of technology, but ensuring corporate governance.

I think this is a superb analogy, and have used it myself before. I especially like that it allows me to torture my automation/orchestration-symphony metaphor just a little more . Because in my metaphor, this demonstrates the role of the CIO as a conductor.

Consider the role of the conductor. Conductors do not ever actually pick up an instrument. They do not write the music, or build the instruments, or play the instruments. They are given new compositions from time to time – some known, some unknown – which they must review and interpret, to figure out how to bring them to life. For any given performance, some of the orchestra may be permanent members, some may be casual, and the conductor must arrange temporary players to sit in, get them to play seamlessly with the rest of the orchestra. In some cases they need to work with special guest performers to bring something extra special to the audience.

When it comes time to play the symphony, the conductor brings it all together, gets the individual performers to play at the right time, with the right tempo and intensity, adjusting to the piece and to the players to present to the audience a single, seamless, and comprehensive piece of music – despite the incredible complexity that underlies the performance. In the end, the audience recognizes the importance of the players, but focuses on the expertise of the conductor to bring them together, and most importantly on how pleasing (or otherwise) the whole performance sounded to their ears.

And so it is with the modern CIO. In this case the instruments and players are the individual IT components and service owners (whether on-staff or externally sourced, delivered on-premise or off-premise); the symphony is the complete end-to-end business service; the audience is the end user of the business service (an internal end-user, or an external customer).

Here the CIO is the conductor, with a deep understanding of the composition, bringing together all the stakeholders, skills, and capabilities, while detecting and compensating for any real-time problems, in order to deliver a seamless service performance, regardless of the complexity of requirement or the underlying components. In the end, the users an customers realize there are many components that make up a service, but they don’t really care – they judge the outcome based on the service they receive, and will focus their praise and complaints on the CIO as the conductor.We have toyed with the metaphor of the CIO as a factory manager in the time of the industrial revolution, casting the CIO as a new-styled  ‘supply chain manager’. In this metaphor, the factory (i.e. the IT department) is changing from an artisanal model where everything is produced in-house, to a supply-chain model where some capabilities are produced in-house, some are sourced externally, and the CIO’s job is to bring them all together on the production line.

The problem I always have with this ‘CIO as Supply Chain Manager’ metaphor is the industrial nature to it. It implies a certain strict and simple assembly process, executed with a predictably mechanized approach. I think this belies the nature of a modern IT department, where delivering a complex business service is often more an art than a science. Rather than simply setting a service in motion and watching the factory produce, a modern CIO must constantly adjust to the ‘feel’ of business and market requirements, constantly managing many moving  and changing elements to bring together a service in real time.

I think this is a much better way to describe the constant real-time orchestration that the CIO has to accomplish, and much more appropriate to the modern innovative CIO, who is as far removed from the role of factory manager as a modern 8-way quad-core server is removed from a Whitney cotton gin.

What do you think? Does this metaphor ‘play’ for you? Is it ‘music to your ears’?

The 'new normal' makes cloud mandatory, not optional.

Today I was published in one of the top cloud computing journals. In fact, it is the Cloud Computing Journal, part of the SYS-CON stable and the same organization that runs the excellent Cloud Expo events. The article is called “Eleven Tips for Successful Cloud Computing Adoption“:

Key issues can make or break an organization’s strategic cloud adoption. The intersection of cloud computing with business strategy, Big Data, vendor lock-in, globalization, collaboration, security, licensing, virtualization, confidence, and the ‘new normal’ can act as huge points of concern. So I put down some thoughts on this, and ended up – in no particular order – with the following 11 tips for the successful adoption of cloud computing:

Please read the whole article at the Cloud Computing Journal.

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So what do you reckon? Are these tips useful for you? What tips did I miss? I would love to see your comments at Cloud Computing Jounal, in my comments section below, or as always on Twitter.

Thanks to CRN for the chance to speak with you!

I was interviewed for a great article published today in CRN titled, “CA Putting Cloud Pieces Together”. In it, Jack McCarthy writes:

CA Technologies has turned heads in the last two years with acquisitions of a string of cloud-based companies, marking its intention to be a major cloud player and cloud partner. Now CA is leveraging those deals to step up as a full-fledged cloud services provider, offering products, services and partnerships to help business move to the cloud through a variety of software lifecycle management and automation services.

Some partners are impressed, but say it may take CA a while longer to fully integrate its cloud services plan.

But CA nonetheless is confident it’s on the right track. “The core of our strategy is to help customers use the cloud to build a public or private or hybrid cloud, whether using our services or providing their own services,” Andi Mann, CA’s vice president of Strategic Solutions, said in an interview Monday.

Please read the whole article online here.

The only Eucalyptus I see in my travels

I saw a fantastic article from Nancy Gohring of InfoWorld yesterday, on how “Amazon said that it would back Eucalyptus’ efforts to support Amazon Web Services’ APIs”. Great article, well worth reading in full.

For me, however, it was the a priori assumption in the first paragraph (and the headline) that really stood out:

Eucalyptus has become far more attractive to enterprises wishing to build private clouds, now that the No. 1 cloud provider — Amazon Web Services — has thrown its weight behind the software company.

I am not buying this at all.

In my experience with many enterprises actively moving to the cloud, most every large organization sees Amazon Web Services (AWS) as an aspiration, but not a preference. They tell me that they want to be like AWS, but typically only use AWS for edge cases and new developments – and typically non-mission critical applications, rather than mainstream production. At least for now. (I cannot comment on attitudes to Eucalyptus – I do not know any enterprise that is considering it.)

What’s more, in a separate (and also excellent) article on GigaOm, comments from a Public Relations Manager for Amazon suggest to me that the world’s largest cloud provider still doesn’t really ‘get’ the reality of enterprise computing:

“Many enterprises today have legacy applications and a good deal of investment in those legacy applications. This type of arrangement provides the added flexibility to more freely move workloads between those existing IT environments and AWS … [O]ver time, most enterprises will not run their own data centers.”

This thinking sounds great as a PR statement, but in the real world it discounts the clear intentions of almost every large enterprise, and contradicts almost all research data. Unless “over time” means on a geological scale, the opposite is actually true.

Amazon simply does not support the multitude of platforms, systems, and vendors that are typical of “legacy applications” in large enterprises. For many, it does not accommodate a lot of mandatory requirements for management, security, compliance, etc.

In a new article published yesterday in CIO.com, the inestimable Bernard Golden notes that for many enterprises, moving ‘legacy applications’ to a cloud environment is not practically possibly:

Cloud computing is not going to solve legacy application challenges and costs. I recently talked with the CIO of a large media company who commissioned a study of his legacy apps to determine how many could operate in a cloud environment. The results: 10 percent.

At very least, Bernard continues, IT would need to completely re-engineer most legacy applications for AWS. However, in my experience very few enterprises see a compelling need to re-engineer millions of lines of legacy code that still does what it needs to. The other realistic option for legacy applications, Bernard points out, is “shifting to on-demand SaaS applications”, not migrating to an IaaS provider.

Which leaves AWS out in the cold when it comes to this supposed movement of legacy applications.

Meanwhile, even the poster child for AWS migration, Netflix, still has a significant legacy IT environment; and cloud-native developer Zynga is actually moving non-legacy applications off AWS.

So then, how then does “this type of arrangement” allow a large global bank to “more freely move” its SWIFT processing onto an AWS cloud? How can a mineral exploration company “more freely move” to AWS for geological data processing from a remote oil field in Azerbaijan? How can a research institute “more freely move” to a hybrid AWS cloud to run trillions of calculations a second to model 100 years of global climate change? Or any of the other thousands (millions?) of legitimate, actual, legacy (and current) enterprise use cases for non-commodity environments?

I don’t think it does.

Even for new applications, most enterprises are not showing a preference for actually using AWS; and Eucalyptus is still being roundly trounced in the market for enterprise private cloud.

This is not to say that AWS is not a viable choice for enterprise adoption. It certainly is capable of running large-scale enterprise applications in production, so long as they are engineered for the environment, and supported by capable third-party tools for security, orchestration, assurance, service levels, and so on. At CA Technologies I am working every day with our enterprise customers, encouraging them and helping them with public cloud (including AWS) adoption.

However, I do not believe that Amazon’s new alliance with Eucalyptus clears any significant barriers for enterprise adoption of public or private cloud. Enterprises that were adopting AWS for certain use cases will continue to do so; presumably any enterprise that is building a Eucalyptus private cloud will continue to do so.

But neither makes the other any more ‘enterprise-ready’ than it already was.

*btw, bad Australian joke for you: What does a Koala do at a party? Eats roots and leaves! Yeah, the Aussies Antipodeans will get it.

Last week I had a great time in an interview on The Buzz with Scott Carty, on Seattle radio station Smart Talk 570 KVI, talking about the upcoming Cloud Fair 2012 in Seattle. I was joined by Cloud Fair organizer Rick Klimanowski and fellow speaker, Margaret Dawson of Symform.

Scott had some pretty good questions for Margaret, Rick and I from ‘outside the cloud bubble’ – like how many clouds can I have, is cloud computing secure, is it all hype, how can a company know when to start using cloud?

So please listen in below – it is only 8 minutes. I don’t talk a lot, jumping in at around the 5 minute mark,  if that makes it more palatable.

Oh, btw, as I mention in the interview, I am speaking at Cloud Fair Seattle on one of my favorite topics, Delivering Strategic Business Goals with Cloud Computing. If you are in town (it is at the Sheraton Seattle on April 17-19, 2012), please come along and say hi! The full agenda is online here.

It's mobile, social, and in the clouds, but ...

About a week ago, I participated in a panel discussion titled “Consumer Driven IT: Thriving in the New Normal” which we produced from HBO Studios and broadcasted in 25 cities across the US and Canada.

I’ve had some time to digest the topics that were discussed, what the other panelists said and what we heard from over 500 IT leaders in the audience.

One thought stuck with me since the event. It goes without saying that, as a technologist, I love to talk about technology. And that leads to a lot of debating with other technologists about all manner of IT. But there’s a topic I prefer to avoid debating, and it’s not politics or religion. It’s discussing what the next big driver of technological change will be.

There is so much innovation spurring exciting changes that it’s impossible to declare one as the next big thing. That’s not stopping folks from pointing to OLED displays, Near Field Communication, augmented reality, multi-core and quantum processing, 3D displays, new UIs, HTML5, tablets, the Internet of things, social media, and more as “the big one.”

The truth is, all of these innovations are finding their way into computing devices and applications now, and they’ll be commonplace in the next five years. Rather than look for a single driver, let’s look at where the entire constellation of drivers is taking us as an industry and as a society. Do that, and you find not technology, but a cultural revolution as the real change agent – and it is built on mobile, social, and cloud computing.

Mobile computing, social media and the cloud enable people to engage with each other, with networks, and with organizations easily, instantly, massively, and on a more personal level than ever before. And since businesses are populated by people, they are increasingly interacting this way at work too, pushing this consumer-driven revolution into the workplace.

As mobile computing devices continue their inevitable evolution, users will continue with this inevitable revolution, expecting greater capabilities, performance and interconnectivity.  It won’t be long before your smartphone will be capable of crunching quadratic equations during a 6-way 3D video chat, all while autonomously prioritizing your schedule, organizing your email, and booking your next flight.

In a lot of cases, all that data won’t be stored on the device – it will be in the cloud; and all that processing won’t be performed exclusively on the device – it will be on virtualized servers, in the cloud. In the new computing order, any device that’s not cloud-savvy might as well be a brick. And any organization that’s not mobile might as well be working with homing pigeons.

So, the ultimate agent of change is YOU. Consumers are now driving IT which, it could be argued, is exactly how it should be, and should have always been.

In the good old days, it was fine for an IT project to come in on scope, on schedule, on budget. But now we have the tools and a global mobile platform that let small development teams create apps in days, not months or years. That’s the tactical piece. The strategic piece? Businesses can-indeed, must-use consumer driven IT to increase revenue and value faster, and more often, than before.

We need to use these new tools, platforms, and services to accelerate and capitalize on the productivity of a soon-to-be persistently connected and utterly untethered business world. Those who don’t recognize that consumers are driving the pace of business to a ludicrous speed will be passed by those who do.

I’m ready. Your people are ready. Your markets are ready. The tools are ready. The cloud is ready. Are you?

[This post was originally published at CA Technologies Perspectives community blog]

I have a new blog post up now at The CA Cloud Storm Chasers – CA Technologies on the 6 Core Competencies to Use and Provide Enterprise Cloud Service …

There is a persistent (mainly vendor-driven) meme going around the world of IT that building and running a responsible, secure, available, enterprise-quality cloud is simple. The theory seems to be that it just needs some server virtualization, adding automation, maybe dropping in some change control, and calling it done. Or that all you need to do is to log on to a public cloud provider, give them a credit card number, then click a button to migrate your workloads to the cloud.

(read the whole blog – 6 Core Competencies to Use and Provide Enterprise Cloud Services at The CA Cloud Storm Chasers – CA Technologies)

You may as well look in a crystal ball!

Welcome to IT prediction season! Again, I am inspired to throw my exceedingly fallible hat into the ring with my predictions, specifically for virtualization and cloud. I seem to have had a decent run of predictions last year, but I claim more luck than credit. I still think predictions are a mug’s game, and continue to eschew both the importance and reliability of predictions.

That said, here are my predictions for 2012:

1. Brands May Come and Go – But No Technology Will Die

Not only are we not living in a ‘post-PC’ world, we are not even living in a ‘post-mainframe’ world! Cloud will not kill data centers, virtual will not kill physical, tablets will not kill PCs, Mac will not kill Windows, Android will not kill iOS, streaming will not kill DVDs. The technology pie is growing, our choices are expanding, and almost every slice is getting bigger. So be prepared to manage an ever-increasing selection of technologies across public and private boundaries.

2. Hybrid IT Will Be ‘The Next Big Thing’

‘Hybrid cloud’ was soooo 2011! In this new world of choices, business will expect hybrid IT: a combination of on-site and off-site; cloud and legacy; private and public; physical and virtual; social and secure; enterprise and consumer; desktop and server; mobile and static. Business will also expect IT to make them work together, whether IT owns the service or not. IT must act as a trusted advisor, as a service broker, and as quality assurance for this brave new world of complex Hybrid IT.

3. Service Quality Will Be IT’s Responsibility Again

As hybrid IT proliferates, business owners will (again) realize they do not want to manage technology; they just want it to work. In 2012, end users will increasingly expect IT to take responsibility for service quality, regardless of who is buying, selling, or delivering that service. IT will need to eliminate the blind spots in hybrid IT, actively support an explosion of devices, deal with complex cross-boundary services, and find a way to deliver a 360-degree service assurance across all facets of end-user experience.

4. Public Cloud Adoption Will Slow

Given the results of this year’s Longhaus research from Australia – an early adopter market and a bellwether for business technology – I suspect the rest of the world is in for a slowdown of public cloud adoption. Issues (perceived or real) with security, compliance, service quality, skills, staffing, complexity, and good old politics will all put the brakes on. Whether ‘cloud stall’ will be as pronounced as ‘virtual stall’ is unsure, but 2012 will see a marked slowdown in public cloud adoption.

5. Public Cloud ‘Gets’ Security

Sad but true – many (most?) enterprise decision-makers still do not trust public cloud. In 2012, IT must do a better job of deploying and explaining cloud security – and I believe we will! In 2012, CIOs will see security as less of a barrier to cloud adoption as organizations adopt more and better cloud-oriented security solutions – including solutions designed for complex hybrid cloud services, as well as solutions that are delivered through the cloud with easily-consumed Security SaaS options.

6. Big Iron is Back – Part I

No, mainframe is still not dead. On the contrary, 2012 will see the rise of the mainframe as a *gasp* cloud platform. Massively scalable, hosting critical (and underutilized) ‘big data’, capable of running complex cloud workloads on a variety of architectures (z/OS, Linux, UNIX, Windows), mainframe is really an obvious cloud platform. It will not replace commodity clouds, but large enterprises and governments especially will leverage their investments and bring big iron into their cloud mix.

7. Cloud Gets Heterogeneous

Not only will mainframe become part of the cloud landscape, but public cloud providers will also start to offer UNIX and maybe even other non-x86 platforms. I have recently seen this in action (CA did it internally years ago), and most large enterprises are heavily dependent on heterogeneous systems for their mission-critical applications. Despite the common myth that cloud == commodity servers, heterogeneous servers will start to become more available for large enterprise deployments.

8. Big Iron is Back – Part II

Big iron concepts of integrated compute, network, and storage are resurgent – but this is not your grandpa’s mainframe. Deployment of integrated fabrics like Cisco UCS and VCE Vblock will accelerate rapidly in 2012 as IT changes the way it thinks about integrated infrastructure for virtualization and cloud – and realizes how amazing these integrated boxes are for diverse, dynamic, high-volume workloads like desktop virtualization, pop-up data centers, and cloudbursting.

 9. ‘Grown-up’ Cloud Service Management Comes To The Forefront

In 2011, the NIST Cloud Reference Architecture devoted a whole section to ‘Cloud Service Management’, and IT started to talk about ‘grown-up’ disciplines – planning, budgeting, performance, asset, inventory, service levels, audit, etc. In 2012, even ‘commodity’ cloud vendors will finally take cloud management seriously, as enterprises and governments demand these disciplines – and smaller providers differentiate on service and security, not just price.

10. Virtualization Management Becomes Irrelevant

In January 2009 I predicted, “in 3-5 years … niche [Virtual System Management] vendors will no longer survive, as virtualization becomes a core part of the enterprise compute fabric.” Three years later this trend has definitely started, and will accelerate in 2012 as IT turns instead to hybrid IT management, recognizing that silos of standalone virtualization management is a costly and inefficient burden. Maybe 2012 is not the end of Virtualization Management, but it is going to be the start of the demise.

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So that is my punt on 2012. I have no idea whether they will come true, but they seem to make sense to me. Again, if you are reading this in December 2012, please feel free to e-mail me and let me know how I went. I won’t be surprised either way.

[this post was originally published at VMblog.com]

Are you preparing your teenage cloud for the real world?

James Staten at Forrester recently published his Top 10 Cloud Predictions for 2012. In it, James talks about how cloud is maturing, and warns of the challenges as cloud enters, as he describes it, “the awkward teenage years” …

“Cloud technologies matured nearly across the board … but there’s much more growth ahead as the cloud is no longer a toddler but has entered the awkward teenage years.”

It is a great piece, and I really love this analogy. I have been using it myself recently, as it fits and resonates so well. It also perfectly highlights the growing need for ‘adult supervision’ in cloud computing.

As a toddler, cloud was not expected to have any maturity, discipline, self-control, or to understand the real world. So we all just did our best to help it grow, resigned in the process to just clean up after it and at least to prevent any life-threatening injuries.

However, as cloud becomes a teenager, I think a key to building real maturity (as in real life) is in giving our budding teen the benefit of adult experience and supervision, while expecting it to show a growing level of responsibility. We need to give our teens the benefit of our ‘grown-up’ experience in the real world, provide them with a positive role model, be a ‘responsible adult’ for them, and expect them to show an increasing degree of self-discipline.

In this analogy, the adult supervision is the discipline of management and security that we know so well at CA Technologies – discipline that we know works, and that we know is necessary, even if our rebellious teen doesn’t think so (yet!):

• It means providing discovery to find out about our teen’s ‘rogue’ activities – not to shut them down (though sometimes that may be necessary), but to be ready to support them when they come to us for help.
• It means providing security and compliance to help our teen stay out of trouble with the law, and (heaven forbid) to bail them out if they do get into mischief.
• It means giving them modelling and simulation capabilities, to help them learn how to drive in a safe environment, so they know exactly what to expect once they finally hit real streets, with real applications.
• It means providing automation and assurance so they stay focused on what is important and don’t get distracted – and if (or as James notes, when) they do crash, they don’t just stay alive but they recover quickly.
• It means helping to assemble credible capabilities to showcase their talent and advance their best abilities, not just grabbing the first ‘uncool attempting to be cool’ thing that comes along.
• And it means providing ‘grown-up’ financial management tools, so they learn how to fit their lofty goals within a real-world budget – and so they can learn to pay their own way when they leave home too!

We all want to help our teenagers become responsible adults. That means for our teenage cloud, it is rapidly approaching the time ‘to put away childish things’ and grow up. For better or worse, that means more responsibility, more maturity, more discipline, and more self-control.

Of course, we cannot expect our teen to do it all themselves, just as we cannot expect to do it all for them. But the grown-ups among us who have IT maturity need to at least provide the adult supervision to help them grow responsibly.

They may not do it exactly the same as we did (with mainframe, distributed, desktop) – but those of us with experience in the real world of IT need to give cloud some basic principles by which to find its own way. Like any teen, they may make mistakes despite our best guidance (and that is okay because that is how teenagers learn) – but those of us who have made the mistakes before need to be there to help pick them up when they fall over.

Bottom line – cloud is growing up, running mission-critical workloads, taking care of others, and soon enough will be driving itself to school. But if we want it to become a productive member of society, we need to provide adult supervision and be a positive role model. And that means it is time to provide ‘grown-up’ management and security, with the time-honored disciplines that we all know are needed.

Because without adult supervision, the teenage cloud may turn into a juvenile delinquent.

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Want to know more about a responsible ‘grown-up’ approach to managing and securing the cloud? Check out ca.com/cloud for more.

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This blog was originally published on the ca.com Cloud Chasers blog.

Logicalis Cloud In a Box!

While travelling back from VMworld EMEA last week, I stopped at London and visited with a fantastic CA Technologies customer and partner, Logicalis UK. Logicalis UK is an international provider of integrated information and communications technology (ICT) solutions and services, part of a group that employs over 2,000 people worldwide, with annualized revenues in excess of $1 billion.

Logicalis is doing some amazing things to deliver both public and private hosted cloud using CA Technologies, alongside key strategic partners Cisco and NetApp. While visiting their site in the UK – just outside of London, I learned a lot about the real world of cloud service providers.

The top 10 things I learned about cloud from my visit to Logicalis UK were:

1. Cloudbursting is real & it is happening today

There is a lot of hubbub over whether or not cloudbursting – “the ability to shift an application from a private cloud into a public cloud when the demand for computing capacity spikes” – is actually achievable in the real world. Well, I have seen it, and it is real. Logicalis does it today with incredible efficiency, as close to real-time as most mission-critical enterprise applications would realistically need.

2. Cloud in a box is real & exists today – literally

With the unique capabilities of Cisco UCS and NetApp storage, alongside CA Technologies automation and a lot of their own special sauce, Logicalis has literally put a cloud in a box. Wanna see it? Here it is! They have also solved a range of portability and security issues with some very clever solutions, even including the perennial “but what about administrators’ physical access in a public cloud?” dilemma. And they make it look sexy as hell!

3. Expert partners make CA Automation Suite amazing

CA Technologies alone could not have made this unique solution happen without Logicalis – or vice-versa. Nor could we have made this solution work without other great partners, like Cisco and NetApp. Great partnerships like this bring people, process, and technology together to create unique and valuable solutions that are more than the sum of their parts – which is exactly what Logicalis delivers to its customers.

4. Cost savings from cloud can get real, fast

How about two and a half million pounds (~= $3.8m USD) in savings? Is that real enough for you? Logicalis has the numbers, but bottom line: if you avoid building a new data center, or reuse existing office (or classroom, warehouse, cupboard) space instead of dedicated conditioned raised floor space, then the savings can be – and for Logicalis’ customers, are – substantial.

5. You don’t need server virtualization to do cloud

In the aftermath of the VMworld hype a lot of people are equating virtualization with cloud. VMware has a great cloud platform, which Logicalis and CA both support, but Logicalis and CA also deliver cloud services on a range of alternative virtual platforms (including Hyper-V and Xen), and even on bare metal x86 servers (as CA Labs on Demand has been doing in our own private cloud for years). And not just x86, because, as I have learned …

6. You can find public cloud providers that go beyond commodity x86

It is easy to find a public x86 cloud for Linux/Windows workloads; but the options for mission-critical UNIX servers are few and far between. CA’s Labs on Demand provided automated self-service for UNIX for private cloud, and soon Logicalis will be providing UNIX support in their public and on-premise hosted private cloud too, using the UNIX support in CA Automation Suite. There is more special sauce here, but UNIX support is no longer the roadblock to cloud it has been in the past.

7. You can run restrictively licensed apps in the cloud

Again, Logicalis brings some special sauce to migrate even software from large, intractable OS and application vendors from server to server, and even site to site, without license issues or roadblocks. If you have license issues today with cloud, you should talk to Logicalis about how they solved them. Crazy cool!

8. Great things happen when you combine great solutions

Logicalis is not just a CA automation customer, but combines the power of integrating CA Automation Suite for Clouds with CA Spectrum, CA eHealth, and CA ecoSoftware to deliver an incredible solution that is more than the sum of its parts. Alongside Cisco UCS  and NetApp storage, this adds up to a mission-critical, enterprise-grade cloud solution that is unique, differentiated, and truly remarkable.

9. Cloud does indeed make for amazing Disaster Recovery

Logicalis is providing site-to-site replication that automatically detects system failures and replicates the failing environment to a public cloud infrastructure, though not instantaneous, certainly faster than it takes to go grab a coffee. The demonstration of this is amazingly powerful, which leads me to my last learning…

10. Hitting a big red ‘power-kill’ switch still freaks me out a little

Part of the DR demo the Logicalis crew gave me simulated an emergency outage by inviting me to hit this big red kill switch – as seen in data centers everywhere. When I did, I immediately heard the sickening (lack of) sound as the cloud-in-a-box died mid-process. After working in data centers for over 10 years, that sudden silence still gives me a visceral reaction. Much credit to the Cisco and NetApp hardware though – Logicalis has done this hundreds of times, and the box is still running smoothly.

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Overall, it was a fantastic site visit for me. Logicalis UK is doing amazing things with CA Technologies and great partners like Cisco and NetApp. Their people were friendly, smart, and highly qualified. Their processes are sophisticated, proven, and automated.

The way they combine these critical elements of people, process, and technology to deliver unique and valuable solutions is an incredible revelation. Make sure to check them out.

This blog was originally published at the CA Technologies Cloud Storm Chasers blog.