Notes from 2018 VMWorld

Day 1 kicked off with the announcement of AWS’ DBs running on vCenter.  This is to dovetail with VMware in AWS.  Trying to figure out how this makes sense, allowing AWS to make their move to on-prem.  Makes me wonder if the same thinking here was the same thinking that led the wizard Saruman to make a deal with the dark lord Sauron.

VMware clearly is trying to prepare for a day where there are fewer on-prem workloads.  There is more management with vRealize Cloud in the vRealize Suite.  There is more growth in the replicate to VMC in AWS.

Meanwhile on the WAN front, there is the big announcement of the Velocloud purchase and pulling that into the NSX family.  CEO Pat Gelsinger has that as a major announcement in his keynote following the AWS portion.  I thought that NSX was going to be omitted from mention, but there they did get their spot before the end of the keynote – so it is still moving along.

On the vendor front, they occasionally threw an obvious line to Dell/EMC their major shareholders.  This was especially true when it came to discussion around vSAN.  vSAN seems to have a positive direction as it was positioned as a relevant technology as opposed to the bumps it had in years past where they were touting features over adoption.  When talking about HyperConverged, it was vSAN, and it was Dell/EMC.  And there was the subtle exclusion of Cisco on the slides.  Dell/EMC, HPE, Lenovo were on the compute slides, but not Cisco.

There was a huge portion of Day 2 keynote to social action which Gelsinger mentioned a bit in Day 1.  He specifically quoted and rejected Milton Friedman’s premise that a company should maximize shareholder value. I’m not sure if (1) he really believes this (2) he’s following Michael Dell’s lead being the majority shareholder (3) he’s trying to appease the Millennial crowd who want to see companies doing this – and these are the folks he wants to hire, or (4) some combination.  It is probably some combination that leads to this errant view.  But, there was a Nobel prize winner on Day 2 – though in the overflow room, the audio went out for minutes as they introduced her.  A lot of time was spent trying to come up to speed afterward.

There were two announcements also around vmotion/svmotion on ARM chips and NVIDIA GPUs (not together).

The vendor hall was filled with the vendors you’d expect.  Apparently, t-shirts are back.  At my conferences attending a year ago, it seemed customer dress socks were the rage.  This was my first multi-day conference at Mandalay Bay.  The catered food is better at the Venetian/Sands convention complex than Mandalay’s.  Personally, I spent a fair amount talking to different vendors that are involved in one of my projects to get advice on supportability of an odd use case that I’m dealing with.

The lab environment was done well – held on the bottom floor away from the top two levels which are much noisier (live music, etc.).

The 25,000 attendees made for congested hallways and escalators.  But, I saw more former Denver colleagues there than I do when I’m around town here.

Notes from #NTAPInsight 2014

After a partial week at NetApp 2014 Insight US, here are my thoughts:

(full disclosure:  I was a presenter of one session at the conference)

1. Keynote thought
2. OnTap 8.3 announcement
3. Hybrid Cloud
   1. Data is state-ful, unlike (cloud) computing
4. Data locality
5. Different UNIX variants – Different Cloud
6. Laundry services similar to cloud computing (Jay Kidd / NA CTO)

Tom Mendoza (NetApp Vice Chairman) was fantastic in his keynote.  He focused on culture and wanting to build a culture of trust & candor.  CIOs understand every company is going to have issues, the question will be does the CIO of the customer trust the vendor to be there when there is a problem.

Lots of talk about OnTap 8.3 – though the fact that it is RC1 and not GA is disappointing.   Didn’t hear anyone reference that the 8.3 is a Release Candidate.  8.3 provides full feature parity with 7-mode.  There was little discussion about 7-mode, except for how to move off 7-mode (7-mode transition tool).  7-mode transition still appears to be a large effort.  For, 7MTT, the key term is “tool”.

The key focus in the keynotes was “Hybrid Cloud”.  One of the key takeaways is the need for data locality.  The data is ‘state-ful’ as opposed to cloud computing which is ‘stateless’ — in the sense that the resource need can be metered, but data is not.  So, when moving from on-prem to cloud, data would have to be replicated completely between 2.   Or more so, if you are working between clouds, or maybe between clouds in different countries, the full data set has to be replicated.  The concern is that government entities (Snowden effect) will require data to be housed in respective countries.  This now becomes the digital equivalent of import/export laws and regulations.

With the notion of different clouds, it reminds me of all the different UNIX variants.  We had Solaris boxes and we had HP-UX boxes and we had DEC boxes and we struggled moving data between.  Some were big endian, some little endian.  So, binaries were incompatible.

Finally and irreverently during Jay Kidd’s (NetApp CTO) presentation, my mind wandered when thinking about cloud computing analogies.  Never noticed before how metered cloud computing is so much like washing machines at the laundry mat – pay per use.

 

Jim – 10/30/14 @itbycrayon  (I don’t accept general LinkedIn invites – but if you say you read my blog, it will change my mind)

Does Technology eliminate jobs?

Harvard Business Review had a post, ”

Experts Have No Idea If Robots Will Steal Your Job”

and I decided to comment.

But generalizing, Does Technology put people out of work?

Most likely.   That being opinion being said, let me clarify.  Usually, what is being implied by the question is:  Do Technology advancements put Americans out of work?   The argument includes Ricardo’s Comparative Advantage.  There is no doubt that if a technology enhancement comes out to eliminate a job, that job is then gone.  e.g. The invention of cars meant that ultimately, the black smith industry was to decline.  Push button operations of elevators eliminated the need to have elevator operators.  But, with the elimination of that position, the human labor could be allocated to other things.  And those other things would be other industries that hadn’t existed.

As someone who has worked in technology for over 25 years and someone who has benefited from the improvements to the increase in the standard of living, it may be odd for me to take the position that have — especially since in business school I’ve learned all about comparative advantage.

However, here is my argument:  With technological efficiencies, positions are eliminated.  Those positions tend to be on the lower end of the information spectrum e.g. earth movers to pave roads rather than an army of people with shovels or voice recognition systems to replace dictation.  We are presently in the information age and a knowledge based economy.  That means that the tasks further disconnected from the product get eliminated.  And so, with the advances in transportation and the like – if there are low skill jobs that are menial, those can be outsourced to countries where the pay is about $1 an hour.

As Amazon works on getting drone delivery services – or Uber dreams of driverless cars, those human positions that were in the supply chain get removed.  Those in the delivery business – what jobs will they have?  And with the knowledge based economy, it is going to take a long time (if it happens at all), for them to ramp up to a technology job.

Things will get real interesting when 3D printing eliminates many of the Chinese assembly jobs as product can then be created in the States — assuming the population in the States has spending money.

Every time the minimum wage is increased, it provides an incentive for more technology to remove local jobs.  Every time the governments pump more money into the system, it increases the ability of innovating companies to innovate further.

1. US Government borrows money to further stimulate the economy.
2. Keynesian Economic Theory says that will stimulate the economy by increasing Aggregate Demand.
3. However, the economy that is stimulated due to the multiplier effect, is the system as a whole.
4. Since foreign products are a part of the system, the fact that the money goes overseas is not really seen as a bad sign (considering they were loaning money into the “system” as well).
5. But, the role and intention of the US Government should not be to stimulate the world economy, but our own.
6. As money works its way into the system, who are the beneficiaries?
   1. The innovators (those with technology)
   2. The employed.

Sure, jobs are created – there weren’t needs for developers with Ruby on Rails experience a decade ago.  So, yes, new needs come to the marketplace.  However, I suspect that many of the middle class who have had jobs eliminated would struggle to fill those voids.

When people talk about the middle class seeing a loss in real income over 15 years, a lot of this is relevant.

I don’t know if this can be stopped, but it certainly could be slowed by the increased borrowing and spending.  This now, may be too late as other countries (i.e. China) with sizable economies have better credit worthiness.

Technology waves will continue to be introduced by innovation.  Technology waves will continue to eliminate jobs (and some companies).  But, the economy will continue to shape the ability to fund innovation — and a significant portion of the economy is funded by borrowing of future expected revenue.  So, the frequency of technology waves is accelerated by government borrowing and spending.  The recipients of the economy are those who are employed and the information workers benefit on the high end and those on the low end which with the benefits of globalization are overseas.  The net result is that with minimum wage laws, let alone other regulations, it is more economical to employ those elsewhere.

So, when the question is:  Does Technology eliminate American jobs?  I would answer, “Yes”.  [I’ll leave the positve answer to “Does Technology significantly enhance the standard of living?” for a later blog.]

Off soapbox,

Jim – 08/10/14 @itbycrayon  (I don’t accept general LinkedIn invites – but if you say you read my blog, it will change my mind)

Lack of Tech Workforce Diversity in Silicon Valley – my $0.02

Earlier today, on a Wall St. Journal tech blog stats were published showing that a large majority of workers at well known Silicon Valley tech companies are white or asian.  This follows some news of the last several weeks where tech companies are acknowledging this.

The question is:  Is this a problem?

And the next:  If so, can it be solved?

And lastly:  If so, what is the one solution or what are the multiple solutions to the problem?

I’d argue that it is a problem.  The world is in a knowledge economy and the more Americans that can participate in the knowledge economy, the better for America.  The lack of diversity reflects a lack of participation in the field and thus portions of the country not participating in the economy, as full as possible.

Yes, there is extrapolation going on here – large companies predominantly housed in Silicon Valley is being used as a proxy for all tech, and tech being a proxy for the best portions of the economy in the nation.

But, when they say that small companies grow the economy, it isn’t someone selling stamps or vitamins, it is companies that have venture capital like the beginnings of Facebook and such.

Tech companies start with some tech guys with an idea.  They borrow.  Then they go for venture capital.  Venture Capitalists want to ensure that the plan is sound and/or that they have some proven leadership.  The companies try to staff up with the best staff they can.

Meanwhile, the tech companies are in fierce competition for talent (except when they collude to keep wages down). So, tech companies in Silicon Valley have glorious headquarters and are willing to shuttle staff down from San Francisco.

So, when selecting candidates from college, what would tech companies look for?  Graduates with STEM degrees, of course.  And what does that diversity look like?  According to this site, , in 2011 75% of grads in Comp Sci were White or Asian.

In addition, those who start college pursuing STEM degrees, under represented minorities are less successful in completing those programs than others.  And this can be tied to how they perform in high school.  Minorities are known not to perform as well. In 2013 it was said, “This year only 15 percent of blacks and 23 percent of Latinos met or exceeded the SAT benchmark for college and career readiness.”

So, this does not really seem to be a problem with the tech companies.  You don’t hear how NFL teams aren’t recruiting enough from the Ivy League.  Going back to the question:  Is this a problem?  Yes.  More specifically, is it the tech companies’ problem?  No.

Can the problem of minority participation in tech be solved?  Maybe.  It needs to be done in earlier years.  In high school and earlier, logic and cause & effect, need to be taught.  Taking on the subject of the problem with public schools is beyond this blog, but the point is that the diversity in tech outcomes are results of issues long before it gets to employers.

Off soapbox,

Jim – 06/19/14 @itbycrayon  (I don’t accept general LinkedIn invites – but if you say you read my blog, it will change my mind)

Notes from #EMCWorld 2014

After days at EMC World, here’s what sticks out in my mind:

1. 3rd Platform Paradigm
2. ViPR (& VMAXce)
3. Electricity model
4. Just like school
5. The Venetian
6. VMware
7. Backups
8. Other folks

Side note:  There was talk of SAP HANA, Hadoop, & Pivotal.  The place that I typically play in is Storage and not that space, so I’m going to ignore their emphasis there.

IT Operational Excellence: Lone Ranger to NFL to CSI or is it marching band

In 1993, Frederik Wiersema, et. al, wrote in Harvard Business Review, their piece on Customer Intimacy, Operational Excellence, and Product Leadership.   IT Operations departments commonly focus on Operational Excellence.  And Change Management tends to be a common thread to deal with avoiding operational issues that arise during maintenance windows.

My intention was to quote statistics on human error during maintenance windows, but I found that the statistics being too specific to disciplines (e.g. telephony, data center).  So, trust me when I say that it is easy to envision that managers would prefer that there be less human error than average during maintenance windows or other types of change.  Certainly, downtime would wish to be avoided.  Microsoft did a good job explaining types of downtime.

I used to hear stories of C-level execs saying after an outage, “We have the navy training cadets to operate nuclear submarines, so why can’t we get IT professionals not to cause outages?”

Let me start with how bureaucracies are formed.  Organizational maturity requires different skill sets.  Until there is enough organizational size, there is unique knowledge and thus the Lone Rangers emerge (forgive the oxymoron of a plural Lone Rangers).

Starting off, there needs to be an expert, Lone Ranger, who still might be a jack-of-all-trades.  “Hey, we need someone to do <blank>”.  At this point, there isn’t much operational rigor as that organization probably is not too sophisticated.  It is possible that the person who is responsible doesn’t even write anything down, they just execute when need be.  They evaluate risk, evaluate the solution, and decide.

Next, another person is added to the responsibility of the technology.  At this point, coordination may just be yelling over the cubicle wall – “Hey, I’m going to change this.”

As more people are added, the change management becomes a bit more sophisticated, as multiple people need to be notified.

Then the enterprise becomes more complex with more users, more dependencies, and/or more interactions.  So, change control now comes into place.  The Lone Ranger mentality no longer works.  “Is risk assessed properly?”  “Who is responsible and is that up to their pay grade?”

Enter the CSI Lab Technician.

It could be after the environment has grown, or it could be after the organization as entered a new audit scope that significant operational rigor is added.  When a company falls under audit scope, for instance Sarbanes Oxley (SoX) or Payment Card Industry (PCI) or Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) then more rigor must be applied.  Another body (usually the auditor) is trying to ensure that all the requirements are being performed to a certain standard.

In “CSI: Crime Scene Investigations”, one sees the scientists in the lab analyzing trace evidence and they are usually under some pressure to analyze the sample because it is from the suspect in the interrogation room that they’ve been chasing all day.  Well, in real life, I doubt that the lab techs know the names of whom they are sampling – because they need to maintain neutrality and not be biased.  Because bias tends to get things thrown out in court, because there are legal standards.  Also, for legal scrutiny, there are standard procedures for handling evidence.  For the chemist, there are standard procedures on how samples are placed under the microscope, so that they aren’t dropped or contaminated.

I worked with a former chemist who transferred into IT.  I’d want him to switch between Excel and Word.  Rather than have them up simultaneously and task switch between them, he would go through the same routine:  File/Save.  File/Close.  File/Exit.  Then open the next program.  I could accept his concerns for RAM shortage given his vintage of hardware – but I struggled to be patient.  “You could just click the ‘x’ and it’ll prompt you to save, then it will close it out”.  “Yes, but I feel more comfortable doing it this way.”  An adherence to procedure, provided comfort.

Prior to this, I mentored two student workers.  One was a Computer Science major, the other a Biology major.  They were both very good.  I was always entertained with handing them the same hard problem to solve.  The computer science major was very intuitive in his problem solving — randomly trying different solutions based upon hunches and feel.  The biology major would attack problems very sequentially – trying the most frequent solution to similar problems first, then the next, and so on.

In my experience, computer programmers and engineers are much more geared to their careers because of the problem solving aspect of the jobs.  What has made them successful through college and early part of their careers has been the Lone Ranger aspect:  Identify the problem quickly and solve the problem.  But, now with rigorous change control, the organization is looking for methodical, repeatable, standardized solutions.  There ends up being an incongruity between the personality of the normal IT worker and the job to be performed.

In The leadership pipeline: how to build the leadership powered company – Ram Charon, Steve Drotter, and Jim Noel discuss that when individuals move from leadership tier to leadership tier (individual contributor to manager to director then higher) that the person needs to utilize different skills at each tier — and not use the skills that helped them succeed at the last one.   In a similar vein, I posit that when significant changes come to an operating environment, IT workers and IT teams need to modify their skill sets to be provide Operational Excellence.

When such changes are mandated, of course, it is important that teams be supplied with the resources necessary to be successful whether that be training or equipment.  And managers need to identify that the responsibilities have changed and communicate that to their staff accordingly.

Enter the football game

When one watches the NFL, it seems that even though these professionals who are paid 6 or 7 or 8 figures a year, you will still see dumb penalties.  These players have probably played football since Pop Warner as a youth, yet you still see the occasional 12 men on the field penalties by the defense prior to a field goal attempt.  How hard is it to get the right personnel on the field?  Or how hard is it for the offensive line not to false start – they know the signal for the ball snap.  So, there are still mental errors by professionals that occur.  [I drafted this before the last AFC leading Broncos football game where they were caught with 12 men on the field 3 times!  Once they avoided the penalty by calling a timeout before getting penalized.]

An NFL football game has changes on every play:  Different formations, different routes, and different yardage goals.  And during the snap count, maybe the quarterback changes the play because he doesn’t like the defense that he sees.  When things go bad after the snap, receivers may have to break off routes.  Lots of change – every single play.  And it doesn’t always go right.

Alternatively, there are the halftime routines.  For high school & college, there are the marching bands.  Everyone has their own place and may have unique music.  Zero improvising is required, as all of this is planned out ahead of time.  See this video for an example of the coordination required:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNe0ZUD19EE

Both the football game and the halftime routines require much practice.  The difference is where is improvising required?  The trick for the Operational Excellence in IT, is to ensure that maintenance windows have more rehearsal and less improvising and that there is time to practice.  That rehearsal and discipline may be contrary to methodologies of some IT workers.

I also recognize that discipline to rehearse and to duplicate environments is easier said than done – lab environments struggle to perfectly match production and simulated workloads are difficult to match as well, and testing time is also difficult.  However, those organizations that strive to drive human error out of their maintenance events decide it is better to spend on the resources ahead of time, as opposed to reacting after the fact and spending potentially just as many resources post mortem.

Jim – 12/16/13

@itbycrayon

 (I don’t accept general LinkedIn invites – but if you say you read my blog, it will change my mind)

3 Reasons why military veterans make good employees

Over the years, I have had the pleasure of working with numerous veterans of our armed forces. There are many experiences which I believe are common to the military that transfer over to civilian employment. I have not served in the military, but I believe my experience with former military colleagues and screening many job applicants over the past 20 years allows me to offer an opinion.

Frequently, employers look for experience in a certain industries or environments: Experience in a software development environment, or a service provider environment, a manufacturing environment, a sales environment, a financial services environment, or an academic environment, etc. etc.

So, what does a former soldier have to offer a civilian firm? [ Given that I’ve spent a majority of my years with IT firms, my explanation will be IT slanted ]

#3 Veterans have experience dealing with difficult people. Soldiers are trained to maintain composure in the face of drill sergeants and other superiors. That training is supposed to translate into the field, where the enemies are trying to instigate conflict. Do you think they are going to lose composure when an angry customer is yelling? Do you think that they are going to escalate conflict in the workplace?

I’ve seen two incidents where a manager was yelling at an employee and a response would have been justified. But, in both cases, one with a former Army private and another with an Army Officer who was in the reserves, neither spoke a strong word which would have escalated the situation.

#2 Veterans show a loyalty to the team. In a sense, this is related to the former. The teammates make up the unit. As the saying goes, “there is no ‘I’ in team”. So, team success is important. In the military, if the guy who has your back isn’t there, your future won’t be so bright. Employers want employees to care about the company’s success. Directors and VPs want to see teams that are successful, not just individuals. Heroes are good, but companies want to know that they can execute without them. In addition, managers are concerned about team chemistry. Guys who aren’t interested in team success tend to work against team chemistry.

I worked with a manager who had previously come from the Air Force (if memory serves that was the branch). He was loyal to the staff he inherited. He backed them up. He assumed responsibility for the team’s performance and was intent on getting the team to function together.

#1 Veterans are resilient to difficult times. In the workplace, change is frequent. In business, if you don’t change, you will be out of business: refine the organization, race to market, respond to competitors, personnel changes, new regulations, buyouts, spinoffs, etc. etc. Some of the changes or even rumors of changes can be overwhelming to staff. In business, projects can be started, stopped and then restarted – or direction switched and switched back. Military staff are trained to prepare for change. Just as complete information may not be available to staff, military staffers are used to having incomplete info and knowing that those above may have more information to make decisions, as opposed to what is public. In addition, conditions that soldiers are placed under are more stressful and more life impacting than what happens in the typical civilian job.

I worked with a former marine who while under a great deal of pressure to deliver. The project was important and it was behind on the timelines and had a fair amount of attention. He said something along the lines of: “Hey, compared to rolling in a tank through Fallujah (Iraq) and being shot at – this is pretty easy.”

The net result is that veterans bring commitment without anxiety. That is a value to any organization.

Jim – 11/10/13
@itbycrayon

(I don’t accept general LinkedIn invites – but if you say you read my blog, it will change my mind)

3 Reasons why techies hate being summoned to meetings run by non-technical staff

Techies tend not to enjoy meetings. And especially those run by non-technical staff. And more so, when they are summoned to them – “oh, we need you at that meeting”. Here are 3 explanations as to why:

#3 – Communication Gap – Lingo, jargon, idioms, whatever, is somewhat localized to the technical staff. Frequently, the non-technical person calling the meeting doesn’t understand the lingo. So, there is a communication gap. I’ve been on conference calls with peers in other countries and there were language barriers. I’ve been in meetings with people on the same team and there have been language barriers. System Administrators, Engineers & Architects have different languages than Salespeople, Project Managers, and Execs. This makes meetings sometimes painful. As people talk past each other or after lengthy dialogue meetings get longer.

#2 – Negotiation v. Conversation – Questions come in that say, “Isn’t it possible to do ?” And the answer is “Yes, but…” Unless the conditional phrase is put into terms that the audience can really grasp, the condition isn’t really heard. If the solution proceeds and negative consequences result, then the assumption is that the warnings were ignored. Meanwhile, it is stated the “expert” was in the room. So, blame ends up as a result. The, “can’t we do” question is a negotiation from the ones who need the solution, the “yes, but” answer tends to be a conversation. Since there usually is a technical solution to most problems and the question typically is interpreted as to what is possible, the answer almost always is “yes, but”. The answer should tend toward, “No, unless you have more dollars in the budget” or “No, unless you have more labor to provide me.”

#1 – Information Direction – Technical staff either have to research solutions or execute those solutions. They are information producers. “The solution will look like this … ” or “It will take this long to run…” While non-technical staff tend toward being information consumers – maybe they are decision makers (managers or executives) or maybe they are project managers needing to setup schedules. So, they need the technical staff to provide the information to the other stakeholders. While they are in these meetings waiting to supply information, they can’t be off “doing their job” of researching solutions or executing on those solutions. It is especially painful when they are in the meetings, waiting to contribute, and the question arises, “why are you so far behind?” or “when will it be done?” Reminds me of a Dilbert comic where the Pointy-Haired-Boss asks Dilbert for daily status updates as to why he is so far behind. Apparently, Scott Adams has two on the topic.

I focused this post on technical staff at non-technical meetings. When technical staff are at technical meetings, there tend not to be communication gaps nor negotiations and the information direction changes where they can also be information consumers rather than sole providers.

How do you make the meetings more effective?

#1 – Translate the information – Try to drive the information to the stakeholder’s concern, try to get a translation. Move the conversation from “if this happens, the port is down” to “if this happens, the customers can’t get data”, or “if this solution doesn’t work, I’ll need to go back to the drawing board.” to “if the solution doesn’t work, I’ll probably need another 2 months to find another way.”

#2 – Detail the requirements and/or assumptions – Instead of “can’t we do this?”, it should be rephrased to “can’t we do this, with the existing budget and existing schedule and existing staff?” (or whatever adjustments to one or all of the 3). Detail the meeting assumptions – at the meeting, I’m looking for “information to make a decision”, “information, so that all the attendees have the same base of information”, “timelines of execution”, or “proof information that is presented by ”

Jim – 10/21/13
@itbycrayon

(I don’t accept general LinkedIn invites – but if you say you read my blog, it will change my mind)

Communicating Company Vision

One of my top takeaways from business school, was not specifically from one of my MBA classes, but from an article I read related to the study of Apple. Former CEO, John Sculley, clearly and succinctly articulated what type of company Apple was/is. —
“Apple is a designers company, not an engineers company.”

It is important that the executives of a company know who they are and that it can be easily consumed by the employees. This allows everyone to know who they are and can be aligned on company direction.

This week listening to NetApp CEO Tom Georgens at their partner conference, he gave a fantastic speech. (I tend not to be enamored with CEO speeches, but this was impressive enough to justifies a blog post)

He stated what NetApp is as a company. He continued on what is important to the company to drive stock price. On top of that, stated what is important to NetApp’s customers. Then, identified what was required by NetApp to meet those needs.

What was great about this speech, is that employees and partners heard – who they are, what their customers need, how they are going to meet those needs, and how that will drive stock price. The speech heavy with detail, reinforced the points above and potentially overshadowed those key points- but the simplicity of those points was key.

Jim – 10/08/13
@itbycrayon

 (I don’t accept general LinkedIn invites – but if you say you read my blog, it will change my mind)

Migrating to the Cloud – Technical Concerns of migrating to an IaaS Cloud

The thoughts of migrating to the Cloud can be flippant or daunting depending on where you sit on the optimist/pessimist scale. In reality, this is a matter of proportion to your environment.

In this week’s post, I’m talking specifically about Infrastructure-as-a-Service Cloud — rather than having a physical presence, your goal is to move to the cloud, so you don’t have to care for that hardware stuff.

My recommendation on where to begin is to ask the question: How would I migrate somewhere else?

It starts by – what services do I move 1st? When I worked at UC Irvine‘s School of Humanities in the early 90s, we had to move into a new building and the finance staff needed to move 1st since they didn’t want to get caught with closing the books at the very time we had to evacuate the old modular building. So, a server had to go over there to provide the Netware routing that we were doing between a classroom network and the office network (it was summer, so I didn’t have to worry about student congestion on the network – though the empty classroom I put the server in was victim of the painters unplugging it). After the office staff could move, then I could bring the office Netware server over one evening. The important part of this story is that I needed networking to handle the people 1st.

Another move that I performed was similar. I had to move servers from downtown Denver to a new data center in south Denver. The users of those machines couldn’t deal with the network latency as our route went from downtown Denver to Massachusetts to south Denver. Those users had to move, then they had to get new AD (Microsoft Active Directory) credentials and new security tokens. So, the important part here is that the users needed an authentication infrastructure 1st.

While moving some servers from Denver to Aurora, into a new facility for us – we again were concerned about latency, so we needed to have authentication and name services also stood up in Aurora, so that authentication wouldn’t have to cross the WAN.

My point from these anecdotes is it is not just as simple as moving one OS instance. There are dependencies. Typically, those dependencies are infrastructure dependencies, and they typically exist so that latency can be avoided. [I haven’t defined network latency — but, for those who need an example — think of TV interviews that occur when the anchor is in New York and the reporter is in the middle east. The anchor asks a question and the reporter has to wait for all the audio to get to him while the viewer sees a pause in conversation. That is network latency. The amount of time it takes to travel the “wire”].

Back to dependencies – I may need DNS (domain name service) at the new site, so that every time I look up itbycrayon.com, I don’t have to have the server talk back to my local network to get that information. I may need authentication services (e.g AD). I may need a network route outbound. I may need a database server. Now, these start to add up.

In my experience, there is a 1st wave – infrastructure services.

Then there is a 2nd wave – actual systems used by users. Typically, these are some guinea pigs which can endure the kinks being smoothed out.

Eventually, there are a bunch of systems that are all interrelated. This wave ends up being quite an undertaking, as this bulk of systems takes time to move and users are going to want minimal downtime.

Then after the final user wave, the final clean-up occurs – decommissioning the old infrastructure servers.

What I’ve presented is more about how to do a migration than a migration into the cloud. For the cloud, there may be additional steps depending on your provider – maybe you have to convert VMware VMs using OVFtool and then import.

VM portability eases the task. The underlying hardware tends to be irrelevant – as opposed to moving physical servers where there may be different driver stacks, different devices, etc. Obviously, one has to be cognizant of compatibility. If one is running IBM AIX, then one must find a cloud provider that supports this.

My point is that it is still a migration of how to get from A to B, and high level requirements remain the same (How is my data going to move – over the wire or by truck? What can I live with? What systems depend on what other systems?). The big difference between an IaaS Cloud migration and a physical migration is that servers aren’t moving from site A to site B – so there isn’t the “swing gear” conversation or the “physical move” conversation. This is a migration of landing on pre-staged gear. The destination is ready. Figure out the transport requirements of your destination cloud and get going!