Cloud Matters

SAP and the Vblock Cloud

  % Percentages.

In my last post I described the proof of concept that SAP released last week showing the benefits of SAP on Vblock, the cloud platform from EMC, Cisco and VMware. 

Now I have details.   

To recap, SAP teamed with EMC, Cisco and VMware to validate SAP software on the Vblock architecture.  The results showed significant potential to deliver cloud benefits in several dimensions.  

Another place you can also see views on this: Chuck's Blog 

According to the SAP on Vblock Solution Brief, their validation demonstrated:

"- Greater asset utilization while maintaining security and availability

- Greater operational flexibility, enabling faster response to new business opportunities

- Improved IT service levels, allowing IT to play a critical role in supporting key business objectives "

So what is that in hard numbers?  How about:

" - Up to 19% reduction in overall hardware and software investments

- 23-32% lower implementation costs

- 18-25% savings in continuously optimized project costs

- 24-36% lower upgrade expenditures"

These are the sort of percentages that translate to significant dollars and time saved.

What strikes me about this is that, while the proof of concept was for SAP, there is an implicit potential to improve performance and optimize costs for any other application put to Vblock.

SAP has not only validated the Vblock in percentages, they see it as a "vital first step toward private cloud computing" and label it a "low risk transition to the cloud".  

Couldn't ask for a stronger endorsement than that.

 

SAP, EMC, VCE and YOU

Last week was big for SAP, EMC, VCE and our collective customers.  

The event was Sapphire, SAP's annual conference and customer event.   This one was staged simultaneously in two locations, Orlando and Frankfurt.  There were three EMC related announcements with one of significance to VCE - the Virtual Computing Environment coalition.  

It's the VCE I want to dig into but let's first touch quickly on the others.

First there is "In-Memory". This couples SAP's Business Objects Explorer with EMC flash drives to enable near-instant data retrieval.  It's all about making business analytics faster.  That makes business decisions faster too.

Second, a reseller agreement was announced where SAP will begin selling EMC document management software for Financial Services and Insurance applications.  These are solutions that take existing EMC software, integrate it with SAP  and provide customers with enhanced compliance, information sharing and business process while reducing overall costs.  

It's SAP that will do the selling here and this represents the first ever commercial agreement between the companies. 

A new EMC / SAP Center of Excellencee was the third announcement. This is a new shared data center in Santa Clara California intended to test customized solutions as well as prototype configurations and create proof of concept demonstrations for customers and partners.  

I like the way that SAP describes it as a "co-innovation platform".  

These announcements are a clear demonstration that EMC and SAP are becoming much more strategic in their relationship.  

SAP recognizes the value of existing EMC technology in the document management software.  They see the possibilities of new combinations of hardware and software through close collaboration with EMC engineering.  And they certainly understand the possibilities going forward to develop new technology and business opportunities together in  the innovation center.

A very talented and persistent team of EMC staff have been working for some time on developing this more robust SAP relationship.  They deserve plenty of credit for what these announcements promise.  

At the same time, SAP surely understands the marketplace potential that EMC and its' partners provide.  That's where the final announcement is most interesting. 

SAP & Vblock

When EMC, Cisco and VMware created the VCE alliance last November, some said it was too early, that we were not ready.  I was one of them.  

That's changed.  

This SAP announcement is one of the best proof points I can imagine. 

A few weeks ago I presented at an SAP virtualization conference.   In fact it was part physical audience and part virtual viewers.  It was fascinating to see the very strong - and advanced - SAP endorsement of virtualization and the cloud.  

The VCE proof of concept was sponsored by SAP and had Levi Strauss as the customer.  (Have a look at this video interview with their CIO Tom Peck.)  The results "exceeded performance expectations" while demonstrating the benefits of SAP running in a fully virtualized cloud environment.  

The Vblock showed savings on implementation, infrastructure, operations and upgrades that ran as high as 30%. 

But when you talk to the engineers who did the work you get a level of energy and enthusiasm for this as a breakthrough that doesn't show in the stats.  It has to do with how the work gets changed and what you can do and how fast.  As one experienced SAP expert on the project enthused about one task "You guys just did something in two hours that would have taken a month using the old approach."

That's impressive.

    

EMC IT: Updated Private Cloud Journey

 EMC World is over for 2010 but it will continue to have impact.  Big impact.

Every one of these shows has high points and a few low points. No exception here.  Always some product announcements, some pretty good presentations and then a few that really stand out. 

The standout this year according to my very unscientific poll was the keynote by our own Chief Information Officer,  Sanjay Mirchandani.

There's good reason.  Sanjay spoke to a crowd of techies ready to leave EMC World behind and go live his topic.  And since he does what they do, there is a natural affinity - an interest in his story because it helps to inform theirs.  

But this year it meant more because the message everywhere at the show was "Journey to the Private Cloud" and Sanjay was telling them of his journey.  This is EMC drinking its own champagne and even admitting that - at times - it could be a bit flat.

Easy or not, he emphasized the need to stick with it "because results from the journey to the private cloud are well worth the effort."

He said it more than once.

Yes This Does Change Things

It's been a great week so far at EMC World.  Not unusual when you get more than 5,000 people together to talk technology, make some big announcements.

Interesting and exhausting and fun too.

The big buzz is around EMC's announcement of VPLEX:

With VPLEX's unique distributed federation, your data can be accessed and shared among locations over synchronous distances. The VPLEX architecture combines scale-out clustering with distributed cache coherence intelligence to enable data mobility between EMC and non-EMC platforms within, across, and between data centers.

There's good reason for the excitement. This is a ground-breaking departure from traditional storage deployment.  Several of the EMC bloggers have commented at length on the technology, how it works and what it will enable for the cloud. (Connect to those through the link above.)  And I understand why it excites every techie tendency.

I also believe there is a personal angle here. Imagine the conflicting excitement and emotions you might have the first time  you stepped into one of Scotty's teleporters.  This is cool.  Will this work?  What happens if my atoms don't reassemble? Maybe I should just stay here and take my chances with the Klingons.

It was suggested that VPLEX makes storage admins strategic to the business.

Maybe.

Virtualizing the data center and using that to enable new business strategies will be a big shift. But does the admin become strategic or just go away?  Go away to be replaced by a position yet to be defined or maybe just automation.

It's not only VPLEX but the magnitude of change brought on by the cloud, together with the business model changes, that will force a redefinition of how we organize and define individual positions,  organizations,  companies and even whole industries.

It's early days still but the private cloud journey promises some dangerous, interesting, and exciting times ahead for all of us.

 

 

 

 

Moving to a New Location in the Cloud

Time to go.

I began writing this blog in August of 2007.  At the time I was just beginning to understand the implications of energy use in IT.  It wasn't long before I knew that the real issues for IT were more complex and that energy issues were a symptom. 

At EMC, we've already done a great deal and we'll continue to address all of those issues in every way possible.

It's been a fascinating, frustrating, exhilarating and often fun time.  I've traveled across the US, Asia and Europe - not a good thing for my personal carbon footprint - and I've met some wonderful people.  Many are now friends.

Mostly I have learned what makes a difference to customers and in some small way have helped spread my learning to help them.  I know that, because they often invited me back.

Now my time and interests are focused increasingly on helping customers on their Journey to the Private Cloud.  Turns out that much of what we've been saying about gaining IT efficiency and reducing energy consumption fits right into the cloud journey too.

So now I'll write a different blog.  It's called Cloud Matters.

Hope that you'll join me there as the journey continues.

Thanks for reading.

Dick

5.7.10

Expanded Thinking About Cloud

 
I've spent a good deal of time lately with partners.  Mostly System Integrators (SIs) and Service Providers (SPs), these are EMC partners that intend to use EMC technology in offerings to their own customers.  Some, not all, are focused heavily on cloud services.  

Roughly, these services fall into three big categories: helping customers to create their own private cloud, providing customers a selection of cloud-delivered options such as infrastructure, platform, storage etc., or transition of some existing capability to cloud form - say migrating SAP to a cloud implementation. 

Now, because it is core to our business, EMC spends a lot of energy on the technology pieces - our storage, software, services etc..  And there are lots of bits and pieces that are essential to make up the cloud.  Some are supplied by other technology partners like Cisco, VMware, SAP.

All needed to make the cloud work and none certain to make it effective. 

Changed Thinking. Cloud Thinking.

This is the Chinese symbol for change.  

That's what is going on with Information Technology in the cloud.

It's changed.  

It's different. 

It's deployed differently, operated differently and consumed differently.

What is implied but not always expressed is that we really need to think about it very differently. 

Like democracy,  monarchy, communism or capitalism, cloud calls up a frame of reference.  It sets expectations for individual behavior, organizational structures, decision making and point of view.  (We could call it “cloudism” but I’ve just discovered that’s a religion. Yeah.  Really.)

The cloud frame of reference isn’t confined to IT.

Expanding Our Thinking: Cloud Potential

I've spent a good deal of time lately with partners.  Mostly System Integrators (SIs) and Service Providers (SPs), these are EMC partners that intend to use EMC technology in offerings to their own customers.  Some, not all, are focused heavily on cloud services. 

Roughly, these services fall into three big categories: helping customers to create their own private cloud, providing customers a selection of cloud-delivered options such as infrastructure, platform, storage etc., or transition of some existing capability to cloud form - say migrating SAP to a cloiud implementation. 

Now, because it is core to our business, EMC spends a lot of energy on the technology pieces - our storage, software, services etc..  And there are lots of bits and pieces that are essential to make up the cloud.  Some are supplied by other technology partners like Cisco, VMware, SAP.

All needed to make the cloud work and none certain to make it effective. 

For a long time, I have believed that a comprehensive approach - systems thinking -  is essential to successfully achieve efficient and sustainable IT.  That thinking surely carries forward to the cloud.  But the potential impacts reach way beyond the obvious costs and predictable IT or business implications. Now I'm thinking that the scope of the "system" is much bigger than I imagined. 

So, forget the technology, once you have a cloud, what can you do with it? 

Head in the Clouds. Feet on the Ground.

 We’re seeing lots of ink (old school I know but I think of pixels as ink) about Private Cloud.  Lots of opinion and some reality.  You may even hear words like “tectonic shift in IT”, which makes you wonder if the hype meter isn’t turned up a bit too high.

I heard a colleague today relate info from a recent market study showing "cloud" as one of the most irritating words cited by customers. 

Perhaps.  But call it what you like, something very different is absolutely underway. 

So, Cloud.  EMC is in the thick of it and so am I.  And I am especially happy that it really does relate to my interest in energy efficiency and overall sustainability.

  

In the simplest terms, if Cloud becomes the broad reality of IT, we’ll use less stuff.  Less energy, less raw material, manufacturing, packaging, transportation and disposal of old stuff.   We will also have more time. 

That’s the promise at least, because more low-touch / no-touch services pretty much take care of themselves. 

I wouldn’t worry though.  There will still be lots to do. Just different realms to do it in. 

For now though I am spending time explaining our view of Private Cloud and working with our partners  so they know what we are doing and how that fits with what they and our mutual customers gain from it.

Seems too much is made of precise cloud definitions but I think of it this way:

Private Cloud: Fully virtualized, efficient, flexible, easily accessible, and reliable IT available as a service. It flexibly spans internal and external cloud infrastructure, presenting a seamless, managed cloud to the business with IT fully in control.  

I recently heard an EMC executive give his simple view of the progression customers would generally follow in their “journey to the Private Cloud”.   It strikes me as simple but not simplistic.  

In essence, there is a progression

First:  Virtualize as much as possible.  Gain immediate payback in capital expense reduction and improved IT flexibility. 

Next: Integrate applications and optimize for rapid deployment of low-touch / no-touch on-demand services.   Gain immediate payback in operating expense reduction and improved ease-of-use. 

Finally: Integrate with service providers: the federated cloud.  Gain improved business agility, increased operational optimization and reduced costs. 

Now there is more to it than this and there will certainly be variations on the theme but I think this is a pretty good framework.  

The next question customers or partners typically ask is “How do we get started?”

Mostly, the answer is “Depends upon what you want to do, how fast you want to do it and how.” 

It almost certainly means working with multiple vendors, each with their own view of the cloud.  And that’s where the value of VCE becomes pretty clear. 

Get On My Cloud

Welcome to my cloud.

For more than a year now I've been working with elements of the Information Technology cloud - private, public, hybrid, federated, inside, outside, upside down...

There are lots of voices.  Lots of ideas.  Lots of skeptics and critics with lots of opinions.  So, I've decided to add my own. 

Much of my direct involvement so far has been working EMC System Integrator and Service Provider partners.  They are all gearing up to provide cloud services or to help their customers convert to cloud infrastructure.  There may be differing definitions of just what it is or means - but they all want to do it now.  Of course we hope they use EMC technology and expertise as their foundation.

I have also spent a good deal of time with the VCE (Virtual Computing Environment) team and there are lots of interesting stories to relate there - although some need to wait a week or two for a few public announcements.

What is fascinating about this is that, if even half of what is predicted comes to pass,  we are all in for a wild ride the next few years.  And not just in IT but in how business is run and how society at large reacts. 

So, I plan to spend at least part of my blogging time on what we are doing with the cloud as well as on the mechanics and EMC technology that helps to make it work. 

This is my second blog.  The first Energy Matters focused on the issues of data center energy and sustainability in general.  I have suspended that blog but I won't stop touching that topic here.  In my mind, the story of green and IT efficiency has already become thoroughly woven into the story of Cloud Computing. 

Convenient for me.

So, I penned (I know, old school) several posts to outline my thinking to start and pulled a few relevant posts from Energy Matters.  In addition, several announcements from EMCWorld relate directly to EMC's contribution to your Journey to the Private Cloud. 

Read on and add your own thoughts as we move along the way.

Dick

5.18.10