In-flight Wi-Fi is a new purple bovine that’s gaining momentum. The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that more than 500 planes are already in our skies with wireless access, and Delta and American are leading the way. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, the airlines are having trouble figuring out how much to charge for the service. With price plans ranging from $5.95 for flights under 3 hours to $12.95 for long-haul flights, usage has not been what the airlines had been hoping for. Completely free service has been tried with great success, but as one airline found out, even a $1 plan caused usage to drop off considerably. In a telling comment that exposes a misunderstanding of trends in technology, Michael Planey, a consultant specializing in in-flight passenger technologies, had this to say about the free vs. pay model:

There’s a very substantial decline in passenger usage the minute you start charging for the service.  It really begins to invalidate the model on which this service is being built for the next 10 years.

I don’t know much about Mr. Planey, but I hope he’s wrong about the model for the sake of those building the systems.  If he’s right, we need to avoid investing  in companies building Wi-Fi for the airlines.  Why?

We all know Moore’s Law, but less well known is that Caltech professor Carver Mead was the first to focus on it’s economic corollary:

If the amount of computer power for a given cost doubles every two years, then the cost of a given unit of computing power must halve over the same period.

We can substitute the words “storage” and “bandwidth” for “computer power” without invalidating the claim. Storage is doubling in one year, and bandwidth every nine months.  That’s why you can ditch your TiVo in favor of Hulu. The upshot of all this is that the cost of computing power, storage and bandwidth is getting cheaper and cheaper by the day, to the point where it will almost be too cheap to meter.  (For an outstanding in-depth analysis of this topic, add Free, by Chris Anderson to your reading list.)

So any revenue model that is built on charging for these commodities that continue to fall in price is, as Al Gore might say, a risky scheme.  Moreover, by charging for Wi-Fi access, the airlines are missing better revenue opportunities by forcing people to stop and ask the basic question we all ask when there’s a price tag of any amount:  “Is it worth it?” Is it worth opening my wallet to pay for a few hours of internet access? The airlines have already proved that any price lowers usage dramatically. So why not  just give it away, and use it as an opportunity to connect with their customers to up-sell or cross-sell them on other services? Don’t force your customer to incur the mental transaction cost of deciding whether to purchase, particularly when you have a captive audience for a few hours. There are oh so many ways to make the Wi-Fi service free and yet profitable at the same time.  “Give ‘em the razor” as King Gillette did so successfully.

So what’s the application of all this in our IT shops?  Sort of the reverse, actually. While computing power, storage and bandwidth are getting cheaper, they are certainly neither free or cheap enough to ingore.  They occupy monetary space in our capital and operating budgets as well as three dimensional space in our data centers. From a financial standpoint, many of us are not in a post-scarcity environment where we can afford to let the user community run wild. If we make all of the resources available for free, they’re going to indiscriminately use every last cycle, byte, and bit. For example, Google used to offer free snacks at their on-site conferences, which resulted in half-eaten power bars and bags of chips strewn all over the room, illustrating that people tend not to care about things they don’t have to pay for. But if it costs something, be it monetary or accountability, the user will automatically stop and ask “is it worth it?”

Am I suggesting charge-back systems? That’s certainly one way to go, but impractical for most of us.  (Ironically, charge back systems will be de rigueur in cloud/utility computing). If cost and budget are issues, and you’re up against your resource limits, then simple accountability is a better strategy. Get some tools and actually measure your resource usage. Sounds obvious, but we see few customers do it. There are plenty of low or no-cost tools to measure storage and bandwidth usage, so it’s within everyone’s reach to do so. Then comes the less pleasant part: go to your more aggressive resource users and really challenge them to justify what they’re using. As Pavlov discovered, they will eventually respond appropriately, if for no other reason than to avoid the pain of future visits.

“Free” in the right context (marketing) can be a wonderful revenue generator, but “Free” in the wrong context (IT) tends to encourage wasteful habits, and we ought to be good stewards our of business resources regardless of their cost.

//spk

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After spending several days this week listening to the major players in the industry outline their current offerings and future plans, it was quite obvious that what I was talking about back in April was not caused by lack of sleep or hallucinogenic substances:

A short history lesson tells us all we need to know about cloud computing.  In the 1800’s  power generation was the responsibility of  those who needed it. Be it steam, water, or electricity, if I had factory with electrical machinery and lights, I had to generate my own power, and if you needed power, so did you. And both of us had the hassles of building, operating, and maintaining a power generation infrastructure which, by the way, was not our core business.  Power was necessary to the operation, but it was not the product or service we delivered for profit.

Eventually Edison and Westinghouse figured out how to transmit electricity, and entrepreneurs realized if they could build a Really Big Generator and implement a delivery method, they could sell power to industrial users. The case from the entrepreneurs to business was clear: “Let us worry about the hassles of generating power so you can focus on your core business, and oh by the way, it’s going to cost a lot less than doing it yourself.”

Fast foward to the present…has the light just come on (pun intended)? Cloud computing is nothing more than the name-du-jour for the centralization of computing resources so that they can be delivered as a utility service.  Nothing more, nothing less.

Cloud computing is here now, perhaps in nascent form, but it’s here nonetheless.

The cloud is not new technology we’re going to go out and buy, per se.  It’s not in a box, and it doesn’t have a part number. It’s more of a paradigm shift back to way things used to be in the Golden Age of the Mainframe (which never died by the way…according to people who enjoy crunching the numbers, IBM’s System z sales last year were in the $3.5B range).  You can read the popular Wikipedia page on cloud computing, but I would suggest you think of the cloud more as a way that technology is delivered, much like electricity or water. You only consume the goods delivered rather than first having to generate or pump them yourself.

From a cloud provider’s standpoint, this means a virtualized and highly automated infrastructure, fast and easy provisioning, self-service, enormous scalability, a usage-based billing model, and a very granular portioning of resources. And that means programmers. Hosting companies that plan to operate cloud offerings are going to need a talented programming staff of substantial size along with a very sharp support staff to build and operate all of the plumbing to deliver computing resources to your doorstep.  Proof of this lies in the list of the brave few heavyweights that currently occupy the lion’s share of the cloudscape: Google, Amazon and Rackspace. Building these utility services is not for the faint-at-heart or low-on-cash, and the average hosting company is simply not going to be able to really play in the clouds until the Big Boys blaze the trail.

Currently, we can find cloud services offered to us in three flavors, or if you like, three different levels of abstraction:

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS). This is closest thing to hosting as we knew it before today – computing and network hardware offered as a utility service, but essentially without limits or long term commitments. Rackspace’s current cloud offerings are of this type. Here, the hardware layer is abstracted away, leaving you to worry only about the operating system and applications.

Platform as  a service (PaaS). PasS takes the hardware layer and adds the operating system and a development environment (software APIs), which you then use to develop your applications. The development environment ostensibly hides all the details of where your code executes and how your data is stored and protected.  So at this level, in addition to the hardware layer, the OS and the development environment are now effectively abstracted away.  Google’s AppEngine is a prime example of PaaS.  You may have already surmised a possible evil in PaaS.  If you develop an application on a particular vendor’s proprietary cloud platform (e.g. Google), they’ve got you locked in to their service, and there is no small amount of chatter going on about this in the industry. The open community is crying for an industry standard set of APIs, while the big players are fighting to establish dominance with their proprietary systems.  Obviously, it’s best to stay on the sidelines here until the dust settles.

Software as a service (SaaS). With SaaS, everything is abstracted – you are simply presented with a user interface for an application. Salesforce.com is the premier poster child for this model.

Cloud computing is becoming a deeper and more pertinent topic every day, and we’d do well to begin keeping a sharp eye on it. Cloud is not necessarily an either/or strategy. For small business, and to a large degree medium business, the server room will eventually disappear into the cloud, and that will be a blessing for many. For the enterprise space, however, cloud services  will be just another tool in the arsenal to solve business problems along with, dare I say it, the mainframe.

If you work in IT for a small or medium-size business, there is a career signpost up ahead in the clouds.  Make sure you don’t ignore it.

//spk

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In every industry there are dirty little secrets that customers either don’t know about, or don’t want to know about. The meat counter at the grocery store is a prime example. Those steaks and chops look really good, but did you every watch the entire process from hoof to hamburger? It’s not pretty, and for most folks it’s Too Much Information.

So here’s Dirty Little Secret #1 of the hosting industry:  While most every hosting company has to make the claim in order to be credible, no one can deliver 100%  data center up time forever. No one. Not even the market leader.  So why then make the claim at all?  Because that’s what customers demand to hear. In talking with customers we find a widespread cross-industry sentiment, usually absent of any logical rational,  that says “my business is so important that my infrastructure has to be running 24/7 without any interruptions at all.” Unless your business is keeping patients alive with sophisticated medical equipment,  this seems like a rather difficult position to defend.  But no one wants to be the bad guy to point that out.  We know there is life beyond brief outages because they happen every day and yet nobody goes broke, but it is typically unwise to say so.

Realizing that downtime will occur, even in the elite shops of the world like Rackspace with their fleet of nine data centers,  you do need to make realistic decisions about what level of  up time you really need in light of the type of business you’re in.  And while it may sound like heresy, you also want to make decisions about things that are much more important than up time levels. It seems to me that if downtime is inevitable, and we know that it is, then I want my equipment in the hands of people who know how to recover quickly from an outage, who will communicate with me regularly and truthfully throughout the crisis, and who will do their level best to get me back on line as quickly as possible.  I want my equipment in the hands of highly competent people that I can trust. You can’t make that determination when you sign up for service via a web browser or where you do the whole transaction over the phone. The only way to make the determination is to actually meet the people who are going to become the custodians of your infrastructure.

Before you put your equipment in the hands of someone else, make the effort to visit them.  If they don’t allow visits, that should be a big Red Flag #1. Talk to their operations and support people, particularly the folks who will be touching your equipment. If you’re not allowed to talk them, that should be Red Flag #2. Ask them about their up time guarantee.  If they look at you square in the eye and say 100%, that should be Red Flag #3. Kick the dust out of your shoes and move on.

Let me cordially invite you to visit our data center hosting facility this summer.  No red flags – just trustworthy, highly competent, and dependable people.

//spk

p.s. Happy 4th of July!

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News  of Cisco’s intent to enter the server market with its Unified Computing System offering has set the industry pundit’s hair ablaze.   “How will IBM & HP respond?”, “How much market share will be lost to Cisco?”, “Do you want a plumber building your servers?” and on it goes.  The FUD truly has been flying.  You would think the Big Bad Wolf had just come back to Grandma’s house.

So, what does the announcement of UCS mean to us here in the non-rarified air of business computing?  Will it help us run our shops better?

Listen to Cisco CEO Chambers closely…

We look at this as bringing virtualization to life…unleashing the power of virtualization.   We go about it catching market transitions and trying to set timing, first in the data center, but make no mistake about it [UCS will make it] all the way in the home… [emphasis added]

What market transitions, pray tell, is he referring to?  Could it be anything other than the transition to utility based computing? It’s fairly clear he’s not talking about our server rooms and data centers.  No, it would seem Cisco has its sights on something much larger. Chamber’s message is unmistakeable.  If the coming world of utility-based computing were to be compared to The Matrix, Cisco would not be found content with simply supplying the network plumbing – they want to be the Matrix itself. Having already tucked away the network, we now see a move into processors. Can storage be far behind? Perhaps the Big Bad Wolf already has that in the oven.

It doesn’t seem on the surface that UCS is intended for the typical IT shop, but let’s assume otherwise for a moment.  Is there a compelling reason for us to consider (or fear) UCS?    What would make us willing to try a  brand new brand?

In many ways, owning server hardware is a lot like owning a vehicle. First, you make your purchase based on size, looks, performance, the features you need, reliability, serviceability, and of course the price. Sometimes you’re looking to save gas (power), but not always. Maybe you decide to lease it. If you end up with a lemon, you know that very early in the game, and you get the vehicle fixed or replaced under warranty. From that point on, if you put in decent gasoline (clean UPS power), do regular maintenance (clean the fan grids, do disk defrags), and operate it within its design limits (proper cooling), it will run well for a long time.   When it wears out, or after you simply get tired of it and want something new and sexy, you buy a new one, sell or trade the old one, or possibly keep it and run it until the wheels fall off.

In the final analysis, whether you buy Chevy, Ford, Chrysler, or a brand you’ve never tried before really doesn’t matter. You go through the same decision process and ultimately you buy what you like or what you feel comfortable with.  The care, maintenance, and disposal process is the same no matter what you buy. And statistically, the reliability is pretty much the same across the board, despite the religious fervor that surrounds each brand. They all run well on balance, and they all have an occasional breakdown. For every hardware horror story out there, there are scores of identical hardware instances that run their entire lifetimes without a glitch.

Of course, if you absolutely must be the first kid on the block with a new hardware vendor, your mileage may vary.

Early UCS adopters on the phone with Cisco Tech Support

For most of us, UCS is not going to help with the primary purpose of our infrastructure.  So what does make a difference in how well our business systems stay up and running?

If you put a good driver (software) behind the wheel of your vehicle, you can be confident it will stay on the road doing what you intend it to do.  If you put an unskilled, abusive or reckless driver behind the wheel, you can expect more mechanical breakdowns (minor outages), accidents (major outages), or worse (disaster declaration).

I resisted naming operating system names above, but ask yourself, when was the last time you had down time because an operating system or application went off into the weeds?   Do you schedule weekly or nightly reboots “just for good measure” because you can’t trust things to stay healthy?    It is an alarmingly common practice in our client base.

There’s a Red Hat 7.2 system that’s been hosting workload here for years that only comes down when we take it down to replace or upgrade the hardware.   We have a farm of VMWare ESX servers that behave just as well.   Yet we also have a number of Win32 servers running on the same hardware for which I can’t say the same. 

It’s not the hardware.

Lemon’s notwithstanding, the brand of hardware, be it IBM, HP, Dell, and now ostensibly Cisco, really is not the key factor in maintaining uptime.   In this day of clusters-everywhere and RAID-everything, it’s typically not the hardware that takes you down – it’s unreliable software, change  or human error.

As for UCS, it doesn’t look like the Big Bad Wolf is coming to our house anytime soon, but it is a good idea to keep a watchful eye on where he is going.  Cisco has cold hard cash and a big vision, but that vision seems cast for The Matrix, not our server rooms.

Buy what you’re comfortable with and put the right driver behind the wheel, or better yet, let us worry about that for you.

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With already a third of the market in hand, it hardly seems likely that IBM could be interested in Sun for the hardware.  Such a  move wouldn’t give IBM much of an edge against close rival HP in the corporate space.  Outside of academia and other niches where workloads push performance envelopes to the limit, Sun is just not a big player in corporate computing.  The sales figures make that pretty obvious.

Clearly, it’s not about market share – IBM is after something else.

Press pause on that thought for a moment and think about how many times you’ve read about cloud computing recently. Personally, I’ve reached the saturation point, because the word has been commandeered by marketing departments and spun to mean whatever fits a vendor’s product line.

A short history lesson tells us all we need to know about cloud computing.  In the 1800′s  power generation was the responsibility of  those who needed it. Be it steam, water, or electricity, if I had factory with electrical machinery and lights, I had to generate my own power, and if you needed power, so did you.   And both of us had the hassles of building, operating, and maintaining a power generation infrastructure which, by the way, was not our core business.    Power was necessary to the operation, but it was not the product or service we delivered for profit.

Eventually Edison and Westinghouse figured out how to transmit electricity, and entrepreneurs realized if they could build a Really Big Generator and implement a delivery method, they could sell power to industrial users.    The case from the entrepreneurs to business was clear: “Let us worry about the hassles of generating power so you can focus on your core business, and oh by the way, it’s going to cost a lot less than doing it yourself.”

Fast forward to the present…has the light just come on (pun intended)?   Cloud computing is nothing more than the name-du-jour for the centralization of computing resources so that they can be delivered as a utility service.  Nothing more, nothing less.

So what’s this got to do with IBM?   The answer lies in the rest of the electrical power generation story.  History shows that small generation companies were indeed started and did successfully deliver power to local business for profit.  The model worked, in fact so well that consolidation soon began to take place within the new electric “utility” industry.  Those in the business realized that the biggest fish was really going to win big.   Moreover, the biggest players early in the game were positioned to be the biggest winners after the first big wave of electrical utility consolidations was complete.

It appears that IBM knows its history and wants to be a big player early in the cloud computing game.  Sun is already way ahead of  IBM in the race to deliver computing as a utility.   Amazon and Google were out there first to be sure, but at this early stage in the cycle there is still plenty of room, and it seems like IBM wants to be an early player – a Very Big early player.   IBM may be hoping to paint the clouds in the sky IBM blue in an effort to create a lot of green for its shareholders.

At this point it would not be Al Franken-esque to ask “How does this affect me?”

Like the early days of power generation, most businesses are all still “generating their own power” with their own in-house infrastructures.   When so-called “cloud” computing really goes mainstream, those days will be over.    Cost will inevitably drive the equation in favor of the utility model.

When I first began suggesting this several years ago, I quickly achieved madman status in the eyes of some of my peers and business associates, but it’s getting closer to becoming reality every day.

Begin to think how your job will change when your server room is gone.    You will still need to keep things running, but the way you do it will be very different. Will your business cards also change?  Perhaps to an address in the clouds?

If you want to get some early comfort working in a cloud before it’s thrust upon you, I know of a good hosting data center where you can get your feet wet.

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