CLOUD 3.0 - On Premise Chaos and Anarchy resolved with IaaS Orchestration

What was good  (^See Above^)  for the  on-premise consulting business 

.... Is now the new bad 

The new good and the rage 'du jour' is  Iass- PaaS - SaaS  with DR

using   Pods from EMC, NetApp ,Violin  and of course Nimble

Orchestrated Cloud White Papers :

Citrix CloudPortal™ Business Manager is a cloud services delivery platform for self-service IT, that unifies and 

simplifies the delivery, operational, commerce and user management aspects of a cloud. Organizations can 

aggregate infrastructure, cloud, IT and value add services and deliver them to users through a simple, selfservice catalog of cloud services. Users can shop for cloud services and manage their account without calling 

tech support or waiting for services to be manually provisioned. 

READ MORE --> HERE

The federal Cloud-First policy asks agencies to migrate three ―must move‖ services to cloud solutions 

within 18 months. The Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative requires agencies to downsize to a 

more manageable, affordable, and sustainable number of computing facilities. 

Even where compliance is not a primary consideration, agencies are looking toward shared solutions to 

help them simplify and lower the cost of providing data and application services. They want cloud benefits 

such as agility, speed, reliability, and flexibility. However, many agencies see a very large obstacle in the 

way the same attributes of the cloud that should deliver expected benefits also raise significant security 

concerns. 

Jointly designed by NetApp, Cisco, and VMware, the FlexPod™ data center solution is a complete, 

integrated cloud architecture consisting of leading storage, networking, and server technologies. It was 

designed to reduce the cost and complexity of implementing the federal Cloud-First policy and other cloud 

initiatives, with a secure, pretested, shared infrastructure solution that has been validated in a lab 

environment.

Security and isolation in the FlexPod data center solution are provided by enhanced secure multi-tenancy 

(SMT) architecture. Also designed jointly by NetApp, Cisco, and VMware, the SMT architecture is a labvalidated solution for achieving availability, secure separation, service assurance, and resource 

management. This means that the FlexPod data center solution functions with the SMT architecture as a 

security solution, not just a cloud platform. This white paper provides a detailed overview of the secure 

cloud architecture. It shows how FlexPod and SMT work as a single solution to address common security 

concerns...

READ MORE ---> HERE 

My Own Private Amazon EC2 and S2 :

All this is leading to something big the Consumer  IAAS alternative for  IT hosted at Co-Location provider like Equinix, Telehouse or CoreSite and managed by boutique service providers.  Allow  IT to become a OPEX service and not a CAPEX cost to the modern agile corporation... 

None other the John Hopkins and the US Gov't are leading the charge. Who would of think it the FEDs ahead of the curve... Not I

READ MORE -->   HERE

FORBES - Microsoft Re-Org is Steve Ballmers Last Stand

"...Is this Steve Ballmers Little Big Horn or the moment when Microsoft rises from the ashes of  Organizational Stagnation? 

It was not Windows or Office that hurt MSFT, its was the motivation zapping internal politics - http://minimsft.blogspot.com/

 Only time will tell if this Industry titan can recover. But if anyone can do it is Microsoft..."  -  KPreddie, Torrance CA

Article By

John Furrier,  www.forbes.com Contributor

Today I was interviewed by NPR Marketplace for a comment on the Microsoft MSFT -0.04% reorganization announced by Steve Ballmer. I’ve been following Microsoft since the 80s.  This will be the company’s and CEO Steve Ballmer’s biggest test yet.  Included below are my unedited comments.

According to NPR,

“Microsoft is essentially admitting in this reorganization that the fragmentation of their products and their strategy has failed,” says John Furrier, editor-in-chief of SiliconAngle. “He’s been under pressure to perform…and it’s clear from this reorganization, this is Steve Ballmer’s last stand.”

Full Unedited Interview

Interviewer:  What did you think about the big reorganization announcement by Microsoft.
Today we saw a very corporate PR, corporate speak on essentially a major direction change from Microsoft.  M my first reaction was the stance of Steve Ballmer in his aggressive in the leadership. I thought that he wouldn’t be around long as CEO. This reorganization was his big push to transform the company.  In my opinion this is his last stand.

Interviewer:
You said he would not be around? What do you mean by that?

John:

He’s been under pressure to perform and the question was will he remain as the CEO and leader of Microsoft, and it’s clear from this reorganization this is Steve Ballmer’s last stand, his last effort to turn the company around.

Interviewer:
You mention in your blog post (on SiliconANLGE.com), which is what caught my eye, you said that this amounts to an addition of failure on Microsoft’s part. Can you elaborate what you meant?

John:
Exactly. Microsoft essentially is admitting in this reorganization that the fragmentation of their products and their strategies failed. They failed in search over the years and they have some success in Cloud now, but fundamentally this monolithic PC focus is over. The monolithic PC is now the Cloud and the edge of the network is mobility and the internet of things or industrial internet. That is clearly a fundamental change for their product strategy and how they their organizing their engineering teams.

Interviewer:
Did you read the entire thing?

John:
Yes.

Interviewer:
As you were going through, what kind of words and bits of information caught your eye?

John:
They were mentioning that other people (companies) have a fragmented approach and they’re obviously referring to Apple AAPL -0.23%.  Obviously, Apple has had a lot of success with the iPhone and having a closed architecture as a device focus. They also talk about others doing well in areas that they weren’t and so that was obviously a sign; obviously the mobility piece was key. They’re saying devices and devices really is about hardware and not so much software. They’ve been a software company so that caught my attention. The trend right now in the world is about software; Mark Andreessen wrote a blog post recently about software “eating the world” and here, yes a software company saying they’re device (hardware) centric. That is clearly telegraphing that it’s a cloud and mobile direction for Microsoft.

Interviewer:
Do you think it’s going to work?

John:
I’m optimistic. I think, as I said in my post, they’re like an aircraft carrier; they move really slow, they have a lot of assets, they have an ecosystem, they have a business market that’s hot its becoming more consumerized. I think, like HP, it’s going to be a long road but they have the tools and ultimately it’s going to be on Ballmer if he can turn this around and move the company in this direction and be successful, we’ll see what the performance of their products. Ultimately, that’ll be the telling sign.

Interviewer:
Do you think that they needed 2,697 words to get its message across or was that over the top?
John:
I think this is more of an internal communication than a public communication. Microsoft’s very employee focused, a very HR centric company, and I think this is more about herding the cats internally to move this company into a direction that it needs to go, otherwise it’s doomed.

Interviewer:
Anything else you feel is important to add on this?
John:
What’s interesting is the Skype integration; Tony Bates is now in a different position. He was a leader of Skype; I thought that was an interesting perspective. We’ll see how that plays out. Skype obviously is really one of the cooler products along with xBox that’s relevant in terms of the new social and connected web that is really driving a lot of the marketplace growth.

Interviewer:
When you say the Skype thing is interesting, it’s not something I follow very much, so what is interesting about the person whose going to be running it and the shift involving Skype?

John:
Essentially, Skype was obviously a great product for people communicating and that’s also becoming a primary communication tool, and since Microsoft really doesn’t have a phone presence really compared to the other players, Skype was a key point in this (unification) communication. Tony Bates was in charge of the Skype and now looks like they’re integrating Skype across all the other parts of Microsoft. That’s different from the messaging they’ve had before but as a standalone entity, so that’s interesting and that’s a big asset. Skype and xBox are two major assets for Microsoft; if they can lever those two, they will do well.


Interviewer:
Anything else that caught your eye?

FULL STORY :

 " Microsoft entering on of the MOST exciting times in its storied history. Good Luck former Comrades " - KPreddie

  http://www.forbes.com/sites/siliconangle/2013/07/11/steve-ballmers-last-stand/

MORE LIKE THIS:

 http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57593289-75/steve-ballmer-remakes-microsoft-one-more-time/

 http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-07-12/steve-ballmer-doesnt-want-to-talk-about-microsofts-wearable-computers

RELATED:

  http://winsupersite.com/, 

 http://redmondmag.com/Home.aspx ,

 http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/

 

 You know a CEO could retire nicely in Brazil, very nicely.

CLOUD 2.0 - Perhaps OpenStack is on Life Support and CloudStack the hier apparent

"What if Gartner was right in 2012? "  -KP

----

NETWORK WORLD:Gartner report threw cold water on uber-hyped OpenStack project 

A scathing report about OpenStack from research firm Gartner warns businesses to beware of considerable hype and says misconceptions about the open source cloud computing project are leading to "dangerous myths" that are impacting IT adoption and investments. 

  

 

OpenStack is a nascent technology driven by a group of self-serving vendors who are pushing their own agendas over the usability of the cloud management platform, argues Lydia Leong, the author of the report and a research VP at Gartner who focuses on cloud computing. As OpenStack hype continues to build, she says vendors are associating themselves with the project for marketing reasons, but are reticent about contributing significant resources to the broader goals of the project. Fragmentation created by the amalgamation of various interests undermines the interoperability among OpenStack-powered clouds and the ability of third-party support groups to manage OpenStack distributions. 

OpenStack backers, in response, disagree. They specifically point to the project's momentum in recent weeks, including its launch of the OpenStack Foundation, the release of the latest OpenStack code, named Folsom, and organizers gearing up for the project's semi-annual OpenStack Summit this month to plan future development of OpenStack. Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, says the report "touches on a lot of different points," and said many of the criticisms could apply broadly to other cloud computing projects. "We're early on in this technology shift," he says. 

Below are some of the assertions that Leong makes and the responses by OpenStack officials.

 

Leong: "Hype around open-source CMPs (cloud management platforms) is causing some customers to make unfounded assumptions that may lead to poor sourcing decisions when they are choosing a CMP to build a private cloud, or when buying cloud IaaS from a service provider. Some people have been led to believe that because OpenStack is open source, it is an open and widely-adopted standard, with broad interoperability and freedom from commercial interests. In reality, OpenStack is dominated by commercial interests, as it is a business strategy for the vendors involved, not the effort of a community of altruistic individual contributors." 

OpenStack: OpenStack officials say "hype" is in the eye of the beholder. "We prefer to think of it as excitement," says OpenStack Foundation COO Mark Collier, who's also held the title of Rackspace VP of business and corporate development. Standards, he says, is a "loaded word," and a project like OpenStack could only achieve such as a status through adoption, which he says is one of the OpenStack Foundation's primary focuses. The recently formed Foundation will serve as a uniting body that will bring the various interests within the project together for the good of OpenStack, he adds. 

FULL STORY (2012) -  http://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/100112-openstack-gartner-262925.html

Stack wars: OpenStack v. CloudStack v. Eucalyptus(2013)

 

 OpenStack has the buzz, CloudStack has the bucks, Eucalyptus has the bonds with Amazon

 Network World - OpenStack -- co-founded by Rackspace and NASA in 2010 --  certainly has the buzz, what with partnerships with AT&T, HP and IBM, to name a few, all of which have promised to use OpenStack as the base for their private cloud offerings.  

How to build a private cloud 

5 tips for avoiding private cloud failures 

CloudStack boasts $1 billion worth of business transactions annually running across their clouds since Citrix released the code (Citrix picked up the technology in its 2011, $200 million purchase of Cloud.com) into the Apache open source realm in April 2012.  
And Eucalyptus -- the longest-standing open source project of the three -- is banking on its very tight technical ties to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to convince enterprises to go the hybrid route, running their private clouds on the Eucalyptus stack and seamlessly bursting into the Amazon public cloud when necessary.
Those are the strategic battle cries as the factions spar for positioning as the open source infrastructure as a service (IaaS) stack most tapped into for building enterprise private clouds.  
According to a study on data center expansion plans by Campos Research & Analysis and paid for by data center solution provider Digital Realty Trust, three in five respondents -- 300 IT decision makers at large corporations in North America were interviewed for the study – said that building a private cloud was a primary impetus for their future data center build-out plans.  
According to a new forecast report by IDC, worldwide spending on hosted private cloud (HPC) will grow to be more than $24 billion by 2016.

FULL STORY :  http://www.networkworld.com/supp/2013/enterprise3/060313-ecs3-open-stack-269899.html

 SLIDE DECK:

http://www.bizalgo.com/2012/10/09/cloudstack-vs-openstack-vs-eucalyptus-iaas-private-cloud-comparison/

CLOUD 2.0 - Theory Building HA Private CloudStack clouds using Citrix, VMware & EMC/NetApp

Why the switch to CloudStack, VMware and SDN

• -speed
• -agility
• -OPEX model
• -shortage of skilled staff
• -focus in on core business competences 

Private CloudStack

 using Cisco  or Dell and  EMC/NetApp Storage

DR and HA - DesignCloud Stack

CLOUD STACK LECTURES 

Cloud Stack 3.06 Architecture - Lecture 1

Apache CloudStack Architecture - part 2

Alex Huang talks about CloudStack architecture


VMware for CloudStack Reference Architectures Documentation

MAPPING MODEL CS ->VMware :

https://cwiki.apache.org/CLOUDSTACK/mapping-model-for-cloudstack-zone-and-vmware-datacenter.html#MappingmodelforCloudStackzoneandVmwaredatacenter-Hypervisorsupport