You know what’s really cool? An Exabyte.

Posted on March 23, 2012 by Tim Harder

You know what’s really cool? An Exabyte.

One of the more interesting (and challenging) parts of working in the cloud storage sector is the sheer volume of data that organizations are attempting to manage.  From the first RAMAC in the late 50’s to contemporary 4TB spindles there has been outrageous growth at both the individual drive level and aggregate counts across your organizations. Just a few short years ago it was uncommon for all but the most data intensive companies and government services to exceed more than 1PB of capacity under management. Today – that is about 1 chassis of capacity in the most dense of configurations. This week alone I spoke with 6 organizations that each have +100 Petabytes of capacity under management with a YoY growth rate approaching 50%. Back of the napkin – that means in roughly 24 business quarters these very well run organizations will each roughly have an Exabyte under management.

Where is the data growth and volume coming from?

Unstructured content — Files, Blobs, Rich Media and Consumer Generated (digital images).

In a rough approximation – across the organizations I saw this week the split looks something like this –

Document2

Unstructured tiers have eclipsed the combined quantity of DB, Messaging and Backup.

This offers an amazing opportunity for you to control costs and decouple the administrative burden from the growth curve.

Cloud based platforms (on and off-premise) are purposefully designed for these data scales and offers a cost model better suited for unstructured content. When evaluating platforms or applications that benefit from the approach focus in on 4 key themes : Meta Data, Multi-Tenancy,  Metering and Mult-Site. If your application stack passes through these screens you should be evaluating cloud storage based architectures (and business models) to help you on the path to an Exabyte under management.

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Who will supply your cloud?

Posted on June 29, 2011 by Tim Harder

1 pipe.  Many uses.  

One of the questions that CIO’s, IT leadership and Accreditation Authorities are dealing with is how to blend the economic benefits of cloud infrastructures with both the real and perceived security challenges presented by this new Service Delivery method.

When faced with inflection points like this I’ve often found that companies will reach out to their top two or three strategic technology suppliers to kick around ideas, learn from best practices and look for creative ways to fund Pilot projects.

If your Networking Service Provider, Hosting Partner and Wireline carrier are not on the list of initial partners you consult for advice…. It’s a position I think you may want to reconsider.

Heres why:

 As then, is now and forever shall be: Last Mile continues to matter. 

But not for the same reason you might suspect. I offer that the security implications for the last mile more than the contemporary performance arguments are a significant motivating factor for you to consider. And who better to help on your cloud journey than the service provider community you are already drawing on for network support.

You see for many of the large end user facing clouds, data is transported outside of your firewall and across the Public network. Depending upon your mission type – this transport method might be a complete non-starter.  Cleartext, Public Transport… these are not things your IA folks like to hear.

Enter: The power of Cross-Connect.

You’re networking service provider, hosting partner and wireline carriers who you already have a trusted relationship with for ping, power, pipe, can easily extend your private network into a cloud infrastructure in a low-friction – highly secure manner.

Leverage

It’s good for you because it can deliver results immediately, good for your organization because procurement can leverage the volume of many different contracting vehicles and good for the provider because it allows them to monetize additional traffic on their (very expensive to build) network plants.

I’ve shared this previously in a brief post last year http://bit.ly/a1HSmT  and helped to build a handy list providers you’ll want to consider speaking with here http://bit.ly/jUfNR8  .

Which of your networks would benefit from this approach?

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Be all that you can be…in the cloud

Posted on December 21, 2010 by Tim Harder

Lynn Schnurr, the director of Intelligence Community Information Management for the Army Intelligence Chief Information Officer, gave a presentation at the Army IT Day in Vienna, Va. earlier this month.

During her presentation, she discussed a handful of new technologies and initiatives that the Army is currently developing to help the warfighter on the battlefield and make their entire branch of the armed services operate better and more efficiently.

The Land Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance network remains a priority for the Army. They’re also working on bringing improved biometric data to the soldier on the battlefield.

The Army is even toying around with some pretty wicked headgear to make the warfighter better. According to an article in Defense Systems Magazine, a prototype technology will provide soldiers with smart sunglasses that enable them to capture images of enemy combatants and record their voices for analysis and identification matching.

Even with all of this cool, futuristic technology being developed for the warfighter, one of the largest innovations that could have the biggest impact on the Army is not on the battlefield- it’s in the cloud. Well…it IS the cloud.

In an attempt to operate more effectively and efficiently, the Army is looking to consolidate their hundreds of datacenters for intelligence analysis and storage into just three facilities (Wiesbaden, Germany; Fort Bragg, N.C.; and Hawaii). These three facilities will interact and coordinate with other intelligence community data facilities so that the Army can avoid storing data that can be accessed from other government sources.

The Army also wants to utilize their intelligence cloud efforts to reuse software. This is expected to increase operational flexibility and cut costs.

The Army’s shift to the cloud will help them become exponentially more efficient. They’ll be able to dramatically reduce the cost of excessive and unneeded datacenters while more effectively sharing resources with other intelligence agencies. They’ll also see a significant decrease in the time it takes to develop and implement new software.

What can the cloud do for your agency?

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Is the new government cloud directive a red flag for IT workers?

Posted on December 14, 2010 by Tim Harder

As we’ve discussed in the past, Obama’s technology team, including Vivek Kundra, the country’s CIO, is looking for ways in which the federal government can improve its IT acquisition process and adopt technologies that can make the government operate more effectively and efficiently.

Last Thursday, Kundra announced a series of steps that the government is planning to take to streamline how the government tests and purchases new IT technologies and to help drive down the cost of IT within the federal government.

Included in the plan was a directive for agencies to look to cloud services first to handle increasing data demand. Also included was a directive to reduce the existing number of datacenters in the federal government from 2,100 by approximately 800 datacenters.

The end result of this plan will be a sharing of resources between agencies. For example, if a datacenter is being underutilized by one agency, they will be encouraged to share those resources with another agency in need. Civilian agencies will increasingly make the shift to cloud service providers. Other agencies, such as those responsible for defense and homeland security, will most likely increase their adoption of private cloud solutions that provide all of the benefits of the cloud with fewer security concerns.

The agencies that will see the largest economic gains from their switch to the cloud will be the civilian agencies. These agencies will see a large portion of their IT spends switch from hardware purchases, maintenance and operations to infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

Currently, service, maintenance and operations expenses account for over 70 percent of their budgets, while 10-15 percent goes towards growth and a small fraction goes to innovation. A switch to the cloud will invert that pyramid of expenses and significantly cut down on the downstream expenses, freeing up IT budget dollars for innovation and other more mission-critical tasks.

Unfortunately, not all IT employees at federal agencies see this as a positive thing. After all, if your job is to “keep the lights on,” the switch to a cloud environment could be considered a major assault on your position.

For these individuals, it’s an alarming wakeup call for what’s coming down the pike. Cloud services provide such value and can so drastically reduce operating expenses that the switch has become an inevitability in the federal government. Instead of looking at cloud services as threats to their jobs, federal workers should instead be looking at them as an opportunity to shift towards more mission critical work.

To help in the transition, government agencies are going to have to reeducate staff and move IT people from being maintainers of the datacenter to architects of the cloud. In an effort to help the process, EMC and other vendors in the market are collaborating on a vendor net-neutral curriculum and certification process.

Government IT professionals shouldn’t be viewing the shift to the cloud as competitive or negative. It is, in fact, providing them with an avenue in which to be more innovative and provide added value to their agency and its mission. With government pay frozen for the next two years, it also gives them an opportunity to educate themselves, become more valuable and go up a pay grade. The benefits of the cloud and its ability to help agencies operate better and more cost effectively are making cloud computing the future of government IT. Now’s the time to step up and stop just “keeping the lights on.”

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White House dives into IT savings “cloud first”

Posted on November 30, 2010 by Tim Harder

Facing an estimated federal deficit of $1.3 trillion dollars, the Obama Administration has been looking to find ways to trim budgets and reduce government spending however possible.

The situation has gotten so bad, that this week the president asked for a federal employee pay freeze. This would save $2 billion for the remainder of this fiscal year, $28 billion over the next five years and $60 billion over the next decade.

With the state of government budgets so dire, it’s no surprise that the administration and its tech team are working hard to push agencies to adopt cost saving technologies. This is why just a few weeks ago, Jeffrey Zients, the deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), announced that the White House would put programs in place in the 2012 budget that would call for agencies to embrace cloud computing over the in-house creation of new data centers.

These programs would mean that every time new IT development is needed, federal agencies would have to look at cloud-based solutions whenever possible. This is a huge step forward for the federal government, which is currently operating more than 2,000 date centers, 1,000 of which were previously “lost”. Even worse, many of them are operating far under capacity.

By forcing government agencies to first consider cloud solutions for their IT infrastructure, the government could see significant savings over time since the creation of new datacenters would require initial investment and subsequent maintenance, support and power to operate. But it’s not enough to make a dent in existing government IT spending.

To truly have an impact on the government IT budget bottom line, the federal government is also looking to prioritize the virtualization and consolidation of existing datacenters. By shifting these datacenters into the cloud, the federal government could save a significant amount of tax dollars on recurring power, support and hardware costs.

They would also see an increase in flexibility that would allow them to increase and decrease bandwidth based on current conditions. This would decrease downtime and allow them to avoid purchasing additional and potentially extraneous hardware to handle temporary spikes in traffic.

I applaud the Obama Administration, Jeffrey Zients and the White House’s tech team for taking steps towards increased cloud adoption in the federal government. These new programs should hopefully drive new IT development to the cloud and work to decrease government spending over time. The drive to virtualize and consolidate existing, under-utilized datacenters by 40 percent will ultimately maximize government IT savings.

With enough money saved on IT expenses and hardware, the Administration may even be able to cancel plans for the federal employee pay freeze. After all, it is the holidays!

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A trillion reasons to embrace cloud computing

Posted on October 7, 2010 by Tim Harder

It’s no secret that the ongoing economic downturn has had a significant impact on our country. In an effort to stimulate the economy after the housing market, financial services and stock market collapses, the government proceeded to bail out banks, give money to auto companies and spend on major infrastructure projects to provide an economic spark.

The end result? The impact of the stimulus spending has been debated, although a recent report from the White House is very positive. Regardless, the spending has put the country further into debt than before. This enormous national debt and budget deficit has left Washington scrambling, with Republicans and Democrats battling over allowing tax cuts to expire, cutting spending on government programs and other ways to reduce costs.

On Wednesday, the Technology CEO Council, an industry group comprised of seven chief executives from leading technology companies, including EMC, I.B.M. and Intel, met with government leaders and proposed another answer. Just make the government operate more efficiently and less expensively.

According to the Council, the government could save approximately $1 trillion by utilizing new, more efficient technologies. One of those technologies is cloud computing.

As we’ve discussed in previous posts, there are a handful of different ways that cloud computing cuts costs. One of these ways is datacenter consolidation.

Cloud computing enables government agencies and organizations to physically reduce the number of datacenters that they have. These datacenters take up large amounts of real estate and tear through energy. By reducing the number of datacenters, the government can cut down on the amount of physical space that they lease or own, and significantly reduce their recurring utility bills.

Energy and real estate are just some of the recurring costs that cloud computing can help eliminate from the federal IT budget. Cloud computing can significantly reduce the initial hardware costs for provisioning and building datacenters, and effectively future-proof government datacenters. This means that new hardware won’t need to be purchased every time a new technology gets adopted by the government, such as video teleconferencing for telework (which has its own cost savings benefits).

Despite the sheer savings that cloud computing and other new technologies can bring to the government, there are roadblocks to their adoption. Although the government’s chief information officer, Vivek Kundra, has endorsed the adoption of many of these technologies, Congress still needs to pass the funding for them.

Hopefully, the meetings between the Technology CEO Council and government officials, including Lawrence H. Summers, director of the National Economic Council; Austan Goolsbee, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers; Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Fed; and Mr. Zeints of the budget office, will bear fruit and help some of these money saving technologies get adopted. It’s a better solution than cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits, and a lot less painful!

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