The Bar

So I thought I'd do a quick summary of the drinks in the home cellar / bar - wine list will be added when I find time :) http://www.grumpystorage.com/p/bar.html

vCrack(d)

So VMwere have come out and publicly revealed vSpore v5, including disclosing their new extortion licensing racket model for vSpore v5 here.

Now the positive messages re new features, functions, performance and capability improvements of vSpore 5 have been outweighed in the press & user base by noise around the new license model, and specifically the now licensing of RAM usage.

I don't know about your environments, but I know when we look at our farms they are already RAM constrained and not CPU/core constrained - and this is at RAM/CPU ratios considerably higher than the new licences would enable without additional licence purchases. For us we're also seeing the RAM/CPU ratio increasing from our application providers - everything is increasingly demanding larger quantities of RAM.

This reminds me of a similar approach used by the "independent mobile high-street pharmaceutical suppliers" :-

1. Release an exciting product to establish lust & demand
2. Make chunks of it free (eg ESXi) to widen the customer base & hearts/minds
3. Encourage large deployment & consolidation based on over-subscription and utilisation
4. Then change the payment rules for the next version and drive the requirement for additional licences (hence revenue) for exactly the same solution & architecture between existing & future versions

To me it's clear that when a company measures itself on revenue & profit growth, and especially if they are in a rapidly commoditising market, that there has to be new ways of obtaining the growth (let alone standing still against increased competition). So it would appear the current model is to extract revenue from the core value the product offers. In itself making the overall virtualisation offering less beneficial from an ROI/TCO perspective - but I guess the assumption is that people are so addicted committed to the product & solution that they wont bother questioning the value of the solution again.

I also think VMwere are trying to deflect their changes by talking about 'Align the vSpore licensing model with IT as a service', somehow avoiding the point that most organisations already happily translate capex+opex investment -> to internal recharge. In fact many don't want their private hypervisor farms to have a cost profile more aligned to public IaaS (ie variable opex).

Page 11 of the vSpore licensing FAQ pdf also makes a claim re "today’s average consolidation ratios of 5:1" - this seems to be considerably different (ie lower) than the claims & statements VMwere make in all their sales & marketing materials of consolidation rations of 10-20:1 being common. Love to hear more about 'average VMwere is only 5:1'....

So what sort of impact will this have?

• for some people & use case it'll make no difference
• for others it will drive material impacts on capex for additional licences, and of course opex as it relates to support/maint of the licences
• generally I feel this will make life more complex for virtualisation designers & architects that now need to design & estate manage around RAM specifically

My feeling is that this will trigger a number of things :-

• Draw attention to the review of actual benefits/cost Vs forecast benefits/costs of ongoing virtualisation programmes
• Inhibit some new virtualisation projects due to cost increases
• Allow VMwere's competitors to be able to promote & market their technology based upon costs/value, in turn generating noise in the IT ecosystem and thus consuming the customer's time in FUD / hype fighting
• Cause many customers to expedite their reviews of the rapidly maturing viable alternate hypervisor / IaaS tooling market, with a view to move wholesale to an alternative or to dual source hypervisors
• I'm also wondering if this is a step towards VMwere licensing their technology by active virtual machines (and dimensions of machines) rather than the underpinning physical infrastructure

I fully understand, agree with and respect the need for companies to make revenue and profit, but I always find it strange when successful companies decide to shoot a foot off or commit slow suicide through strangling their customers...

Rounding the wagons?

So the tin providers can see the differentiation end coming, they can see the need to drop their high margins are vast & costly sales structures and move into other areas.

A few of these talk a story, but very very few of them appear to be able to do something meaningful or lasting.

Consolidation in the infrastructure stack market - lots of blogs talking about this, lots of disruption and issues, lots of risk & downside for the customer.

Oracle made the first move with an application provider acquiring Sun in order to control their own destiny re infrastructure and have better control of their own margins, but despite this they have a dead h/ware business that they are desperate to force onto customers (although I think few Oracle people understand the word customer, most seem to  interpret it as fund payer for their Porsche & holiday homes). Increasingly we now see that Snoracle's applications are 'only provided' or 'only supported' if bolted to the tin albatrosses bodged together by themselves.

EMC and their pet VMWare are nibbling around the edges purchasing software development tool companies, acquirin some serious individual tallent and now into the DW/BI and eventually database area.

If I look at HP, they have lots - but several areas they are lacking in (excusing the clear lack of sales, marketing & product proposition talent) are :-

• Database
• Middleware
• x86 Server Operating Systems

If I look at IBM, they have everything except direction, sales, marketing, focus and conviction...

SAP buying Sybase was interesting for a number of reasons :-

• Removes the last major (meaning deployments in existing data-centres) RDBMS from the table for those infrastructure companies desperate to have a plat in the database world (eg EMC, HP etc)
• Will further muddy the water with SAP's database usage relationship with Oracle
• Might knock some sense into Sybase's management team
• Doesn't seem to add much obvious additional value, synergies or savings for SAP
• Will likely start a bidding war for other 'platform tool' players in the mobility market - although all of these will be competing with the networks & the device providers themselves...

But when do we see the first IT infrastructure company buy a business application software provider? Would you put money on EMC or HP acquiring Teradata, SAP, SAS, Amdocs, Comverse, Sage, Tibco

Is anybody interested in acquiring Citrix? BMC? Symantec? RedHat? Novell?

Of course all of the infrastructure companies are courting Microsoft for partnership scraps off the table in the SMB application areas.

So whilst the masters of FUD fight their whispering battles against each other, the account teams become increasingly desperate and high-maintenance and the manufacturers fight each other (eg Snoralce Vs Intel/HP) as far as I can see it's only the customer that loses - quality, clarity, options, stability all reducing...

Metric, SI & ISO matters

So watching @rootwyrm & @bradhedlund argue about DC design and facilities so time back reminded me of one of my main pet hates. That of people that still use imperial measurements!

Heck even the country that defined them has (mainly) moved on to SI & ISO units. So you can imagine quite how irritating / depressing / demoralising it is to hear technology people talk about lbs, feet, BTU etc

Metric is very simple, more precise and used in the majority of countries. KPIs and measurements matter seriously, and in this global culture it is vital that everybody uses & thoroughly understands exactly the same dimensions and measures.

But yet even in this age of iPads & Android phones, IT vendors still use archaic measurements in their specifications & benchmarks.

Woe betide the first provider I hear offering me 14lbs of cloud servers. or 5/16th of a TB/s bandwidth...

Alarm Bells

So in my experience everybody has their own individual hot buttons, the topics that trigger those alarm bells in your head. The statements that make you stop what you were doing, and sit up to actually pay attention to the meeting / conference call / video conference you were supposed to be enduring / participating in.

Now for me these alarm bells can be areas I have particular specialist expertise in (started small and reducing daily), topics I have a passion in (growing), FUD, or just things that leave me initially dumfounded.

Naturally in the last few years I've had plenty of these, a couple of recent ones that come to mind are :-

1) "Writing data to a CD at a person's desk and keeping it in a drawer is more secure than storing it on an array in a corporate information management platform within a data centre"

2) "We need physical segregation between virtual servers" (Now depending on the context this can be valid in order to enable fault tolerant services, however 90% of the time its used by non-trusting tin huggers.)

So once I'd closed the PowerPoint deck that I was inevitably editing at the time, asked for a replay of the conversation & recovered my composure - I thought for a while (quite a while in fact, in order to self censor the expletives).

My first conclusion was a simple one - "Are the TeleTubbies now working in IT?". My second conclusion was probably of more use - "IT is moving too fast and leaving many people, processes, definitions, roles & techniques without time to adjust - let alone time for diverse disciplines to align.". My third conclusion was "people still look at partial, incomplete & inaccurate cost models - and have little actual or mental methods for valuing risk or consequence"

Not a radical, new or difficult set of conclusions at all really - but ones we don't seem to be making any real progress on. But something that are vital for us to resolve urgently in order to prevent the IT technology hermits detailing the future.

Oh and (with the exception of @Beaker) I continue to believe IT Security dudes live in an entirely parallel independent universe with no concept of reality, consequence or costs!

Kindle - IT companies take note

So as per my previous blog entries show, I'm a major personal fan of Amazon's Kindle eBook reader. It's really improved my reading experience and consumption.

So why do I think Kindle is important to IT companies? Well to put it simply it's a great cross-platform framework for information delivery and consumption! I can seamlessly access & synchronise the same eBook content on an iPhone, Android phone, PC, iPad & Kindle ereader.

Yes Kindle can read & display existing Adobe PDF files, but they are nowhere near as usable & visually readable as eBook format documents.

There are also some other interesting advantages :-

* built in secure channels for charged, or less public, content

* ability to automatically push & receive updated document versions

* the annotations & highlighting capabilities allow peers to share 'user feedback & content' associated with the document & topic

So Gartner, when will you deliver your reports & papers via Kindle's secure subscription channels?

So EMC, HP, HDS, IBM, Cisco, Netapp, Oracle et al - when are you going to deliver your whitepapers, product manuals and documentation in eBook format?

From a marketing aspect, just bundle a kindle (or iPad running kindle) with your enterprise data-centre products - stock it full if your documentation and watch your happy customers...

Still here

Yes I'm still here, yes I'm daftly busy right now on all the wrong kinds of work - overall my mood could probably be best described by :-

Hopefully in the next few weeks I'll be able to finish and publish the 90+ partially written blog posts and move back to more IT infrastructure related topics...