The IT Management & Cloud Podcast

Bulgarians are kind – IT Management & Cloud Podcast #57

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 07:26:09 -0700

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

After a brief hiatus, John Willis and I are back. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do:

John in Bulgaria – the shrinking brain – SpringSource guy talk – Clojure.
Coté gets Infochimps and 80legs confused, and here’s the interesting looking airlines Big Data talk mentioned. And check out the 80legs competition I’ll be a judge in.
NoSQL East – where John is keynoting.
Bulgarian food
SpringOne panel re-telling – it turns out Coté is pretty conservative on cloud computing. Later, we talk about Cloud Foundry demos and vSphere during the cloud keynotes here.
This gets us to discussing some ideas for getting mainstream IT involved in cloud computing – starting small, legacy vs. green-field, etc.
The problem with coming up with a good phrase for “post SQL”
Amazon MySQL offering – AWS blog and Cloud Ave. coverage.
Cloud brokering and some paper on the theory of hierarchy.
BMC buys Tideway – discovery, and using it to think about how BMC goes about acquiring companies
Sidekick storage scandal – not so much a cloud story, but a teaching moment for doing personal risk management with consumer technology.
NPR’s “privacy is dead” series.
Coté rants about “The Kids” not being so IT savvy as we might think they’ll be. (As I disclose at the end, I’m not really suggesting they’re dumb, but looking to push the cliché stories about The Kids along to something more useful.)
Ubuntu Cloud road-show, Nov 10th in London with RedMonk’s own James Governor.
Unbuntu 9.10 Server – John goes over option for Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud.
SpiceWorld and SpiceWorks growth. Keep a look out for the video of the panel I moderated – the panelists had some excellent, pragmatic tips for IT getting by in bad economic times.
GroundWork, series D funding.
Zenoss 2.5 update – with cloud friendly stuff.
Quick pointers: dev2ops interview with Lee Thompson, Sun OpsManager, IBM Dynamic Infrastructure bucket of announcements, John has a good ControlTier interview.
Two new Big Data books: Heads First Data Analysis and Cloud Security and Privacy.

Disclosure: Groundwork, Zenoss, IBM, Spiceworks, Basho, Canonical, Microsoft, and others mentioned are clients.

Dell in the Clouds, Barton George – IT Management & Cloud Podcast #56

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:41:15 -0700

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

For this episode, John and I are joined by special guest Barton George, Dell Cloud Evangelist. You might remember Barton from the Profilers in Courager series at CloudCampAustin. As you can imagine, we spend most of our time talking about Dell’s current doings in cloud computing:

Barton tells us what Dell’s been up to in the cloud, for example with Microsoft around Azure.
John asks Barton about the different issues (or “problems”) that come up in hyper-scale computing: lots of cooling and power issues.
This reminds me of one of my favorite El Reg pieces on “punk IT” from years ago.
Barton also discusses how Dell’s SaaS offerings fit into the cloud strategy.
Some recent Ubuntu news and Barton’s recent interview with Mark Shuttleworth.
We wrap up talking about how Austin’s changed since John was here last and talk about the new Pokens.

Check out Barton’s show notes as well, more detailed to the Dell items.

Disclosure: Dell is a client, as are Canonical and Microsoft. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

ITSM with a hint of cloud – IT Management & Cloud Podcast #55

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 09:37:30 -0700

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

This week, both John and I are out and about at conferences, necessitating the dreaded, lo-fi phone recording option. Enjoy!

John is at the NCIO – John gives us a review of that. Google providing custom search engines for the US intelligence agency. Reminds me of Citrix talking about how much intel agencies like virtualized networks.
itSMF Fusion – pretty good so far. John says their problem is figuring out how this maps to cloud computing.
Check out PuppetCamp – see agenda and details – Oct 1st and 2nd in SF.
What’s “the consumerization of IT” look like here? How does that trend effect how IT service delivery is done? Maybe it means more meta-data encoding, John says, echo’ing the Reductive Labs guys. Maybe IT has more time to customize their applications, like adding dopplr to hotel kiosks instead of those kiosks staying stale.
Upcoming RCA webinar – Oct 1st, register here.
Dell & Perot – Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Register has a nice analysis. We recall Perot and EDS stories, like a good Dallas Morning News story on the history of EDS.
CA buys NetQoS – summary of my take, and John gives us the common view of CA: a cash-cow holder.
Jonh’ll be down in Austin this week, we’ll have a live recording.
Groundwork 6.0 out – among other things: JBoss portal re-write, dashboard stuff. Also MonitoringForge.org.

Disclosure: Groundwork, Reductive Labs, Dell, and others are clients.

It’s Virtualization Time – IT Management & Cloud Podcast #54

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 09:30:16 -0700

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

This week, John and I catch up the virtualization and cloud news that’s been floating around over the past week, of which there was much:

John in Bulgaria, at Java2Days.
VMworld: Fellow RedMonker Stephen’s take. Moving between public and private clouds. does VMWare have a “real” cloud, or just good virtualization?
RedHat Summit and RedHat’s cloud take.
John says VMWare’s virtualization is still too labor intensive.
The problem with the 100% open cloud – how does a provider differentiate on features if any provider can have it? Competing beyond price and speed.
The RedHat cloud-application migration and development story.
Coté’s JBoss assessment – seeming to catch-up, but not as revolutionary as the used to be, the mantel of which seems to be help by open source and Spring.
John checking out Eucalyptus in Ubuntu alpha release.
Virtualization in Ubuntu land – KVM, kid.
Looking forward to the Citrix Industry Analyst event next week. What ever happened to Citrix and 3Tera?
Clouds vs. virtualized data centers.
Overview of Capital Factory Demo Day.
The ISV Renaissance – actually charing for/paying for software – what did the VC-types at the Capital Factory Demo Day say?
John really likes JungleDisk of an example here. And the Silverpop Atlanta guy.
In light of all this, r0ml’s IT as a Deli talk is starting to make even more sense.

Disclosure: see the the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.

Catching up with David Dennis and Mark Hinkle – IT Management & Cloud Podcast Episode 53

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 20:43:26 -0700

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

While at the RedHat Summit/JBoss World today, I sat down for a quick chat with GroundWork’s David Dennis and Zenoss‘ Mark Hinkle. I ask them for their thoughts on the show, RedHat 5.4 and KVM, Mark’s take on the recent Bossie awards, and how they’re looking at VMWare/SpringSource/Hyperic now-a-days.

Disclosure: GroundWork and Zenoss are clients, as is SpringSource.

Who put that private cloud in my public cloud? – IT Management & Cloud Podcast Episode #52

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 07:16:24 -0700

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

This week John and I discuss several things:

John calls in from the Atlanta Open Coffee Club. Roam, Business Cafe and Meeting Center.
Amazon VPC – John doesn’t like the whole railing against “private clouds” slant. See Coté’s advice to other cloud vendors.
John has more to report on “cloud brokers.”
newScale Service Catalog demo, with the VMWare.
“Circling the wagon” and Econobonics.
John gives us a new take on VDI.
Cray bought some company.
Surgient getting into private cloud automation stuff
Next week is VMworld, RedHat Summit
NoSQL East, Oct 28th to 30th. Anyone got some select * from kiss_my_ass?
Rob England on COBIT – looks interesting.
Rackspace Cloud Tools – a catalog of stuff running on an using Rackspace.

Disclosure: see RedMonk clients for clients mentioned.

Enterprise PaaS – IT Management & Cloud Podcast #51

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 11:21:23 -0700

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

In this episode, John and I spend a lot of time horsing off, but we talk about some on-topic things as well:

The most important news of the week: John has an iPhone. (And yes, Wal-mart does sell the iPhone.)
Lower Amazon prices – John details this. The Deli case. No word on the Deli, but there is Memo Jokes.
How do you setup a Windows box, esp. virtualization. John says ESXi, the free VMWare client.
SpringSource and cloud foundry – deploying and managing Java apps in public clouds.
Last episode, John had commented on the valuation for other Little 4 types in light of the SpringSource price. Zenoss’ Mark Hinkle got back to John on this topic.
We get into enterprise/corporate uses of PaaS – using Heroku and EngineYard as proxy for thinking about how Azure and Java in the clouds might pan out for corporate developers vs. IT staff.
While the quick and easy approach is awesome, I ask John to recount some IT disasters he’s seen when there’s not enough IT process and too much “quick and easy” think.
What’s up with devopsdays? In Belgium Oct 30 – 31st – John will present there on the Ubuntu elastic cloud with Chef. From this Patrick Dubous guy. Maikin Piss!
itSMF Fusion conference – Sep. 20-23rd in Dallas. Is that anything? Agenda looks nice and ITIL-y. Mike Walker in Atlanta runs the ATL itSMF.
“Cloud Brokers” and extradition free countries – but seriously, John explains this idea of “cloud brokers.”

Disclosure: Zenoss, IBM, Microsoft, SpringSource, and others mentioned are clients.

ConVirt Open Source Virtualization Management - Part 2

Virtualization is magic of IT shops, but as with any technology it creates it's own unique set of management challenges. That's why it was fun to sit down with Convirture's Jaydeep Marfatia and Arsalan Farooq for this two part screencast and see how ConVirt tackles virtualization management issues. They also indulge me in some "the future of IT management" talk which you know I always enjoy - there's even some private cloud talk.

In this second part, we get into actual management, seeing how ConVirt manages not only the basic parameters for each virtual machine, but also the pools of storage and private networks. When it comes to provisioning, ConVirt also offers the optional intelligent VM placement that automatically figures out the best host to put a new virtual server. We wrap up by going over the ConVirt community and commercial support options.

Disclosure: Convirture is a client and sponsored this video.

ConVirt Open Source Virtualization Management - Part 1

In this first part, we start out with a quick history and overview of the ConVirt project and Convirture the company. Next, we look at the console for browsing physical and virtual machines, using it drill down into each to look at configuration and health metrics. Having browsed through existing servers, we start looking at how ConVirt helps you create a library of virtual images by creating templates. We see how you can use these templates - with all sorts of settings for the server, storage, network, and more - to create new virtual servers.

Disclosure: Convirture is a client and sponsored this video.

Zenoss Update with Bill Karpovich at OpenSourceWorld

While at OpenSourceWorld, I talked with Zenoss' Bill Karpovich, getting an update on what's been going on with Zenoss. We talk about recent versions, management packs (with over a 100 now), the community, and reaching the million downloads milestone.

Disclosure: Zenoss is a client.

Reductive Labs update with Luke Kanies at OpenSourceWorld

While at OpenSourceWorld, I pulled aside Reductive Lab's Luke Kanies to get an update on what's been going on in the Puppet world, esp. after the (very) recent funding Reductive Labs got. In the brief interview, we touch on the new staff and the product road-map.

Disclosure: Reductive Labs is a client.

The Big 50 – IT Management & Cloud Podcast

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 08:43:13 -0700

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

In episode 50 (!), John and I discuss:

mil-oss
John’s new job with Canonical, also an advisor for OpsCode/Chef
John’s cloud talk (this one?) at mil-oss going over what’s available for, you know, cloud computing.
Coté indulges himself in repeating all the brilliant things he said at the open source management panel at OpenSourceWorld.
VMWare buys SpringSource – see Stephen O’Grady’s and my own takes on it.

Better show notes soon…

Disclosure: SpringSource is a client, as is Canonical. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

OpenNMS Update from Tarus Balog

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 10:30:27 -0700

I managed to button-hole Tarus Balog of the OpenNMS Group. In this short shaky-cam interview, I ask him to give us a quick update on OpenNMS. He talks primarily about the new “provisioning” system that cleans up the way inventory and cataloging of discovered devices is put together in stored, a “CMDB in a file” as I joke. We also talk about Honduran cellphone monitoring.

OpenNMS Update from Tarus Balog - OpenSourceWorld

I managed to button-hole Tarus Balog of the OpenNMS Group. In this short shaky-cam interview, I ask him to give us a quick update on OpenNMS. He talks primarily about the new "provisioning" system that cleans up the way inventory and cataloging of discovered devices is put together in stored, a "CMDB in a file" as I joke. We also talk about Honduran cellphone monitoring.

“There’s a cloud for that.” – IT Management & Cloud Podcast #49

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 14:44:38 -0700

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

This week, John and I meander around several topics:

Baltimore fun facts: umbrellas.
Google building a data center in Belgium.
New restaurant update: Frank in Austin (”hot dogs, cold beer”), glazed donut burgers in Atlanta (like this?).
Hadoop, The Definitive Guide – a pre-reading book review.
The “Lean IT” meme – from CA, or Forrester? See a FAQ here.
And this leads me to ask: has the phrase “BSM” and “business service delivery” talk flipped the bozo bit for marketing talk? John remembers some tales in this area.
John tells us The Good News about BSM, tough-love version. You’ve got have your plumbing fixed before applying “BSM in a box,” but how well does “fix your plumbing in a box” sell?
John’s review of a recent Gartner webcast on CIO priorities and performance.
John’s DMTF wanderings – OVM, OVF, vSphere deployment. Maybe Winston Bumpus. XML templates for virtual appliances.
Dealing with PR email, embargo’s, etc. For bed time reading, see the infamous TechCrunch take on embargoes.
Rivermuse launchy – event management, correlation, etc. What is this “event management” anyhow? John says SMARTS is dandy here.
Our man William over at Oracle has been doing nice stuff on his blog of late, lots of details on how all this IT Management gorp should be designed. I esp. like this line from one post in his series on REST in IT Management: “I can think of ways in which some REST principles would help in this area, but they are mainly along the lines of ‘any consistent set of principles would help’ rather than anything specific to REST.” Yuh! Sidenote: (a.) “REST” is an idea like “Democracy” or “Christianity,” good luck getting any agreement on what it actually looks like in practice, and (b.) better luck having the canonical use be practical.
memcache meme – Gear6, North Scale, so on and so forth. Seems like it’s on the open source enterprise creep-in path.
IBM buying SPSS – John’s SAS memories – also see James Governor’s take on the buy.
Tech books – what do we have?
New T-shirt slogan: “there’s a cloud for that.” re: Rackspace private cloud.
Tell us what books and fun facts and cities you like on the #ITMguys.

Disclosure: many folks mentioned are clients, see the RedMonk clients list for which ones.

Spiceworks 4.0 with Tabrez Syed

Recently, I say down with Tabrez Syed of Spiceworks to go over their most recent version, Spiceworks 4.0. In introducing himself, Tabrez speaks to the mixed role he has at Spiceworks, a combination of traditional product management and the newer practices of community management. As we discuss Spiceworks more, it's interesting to see how these two roles play out. To that end, I ask Tabrez to give us an overview of Spiceworks itself. More than just the asset discovery, monitoring, help-desk, and reporting, Spiceworks also incorporates the thriving community (over 700,000 users) around the product.

Focusing in on the community aspects, I ask Tabrez to characterize the folks in the community: what types of IT shops and organizations are they? Being in the small and medium business category, these folks are often balancing both the technical requirements and small pools of cash and time.

We then go over the new features in Spiceworks 4.0. Starting with help desk improvements., Tabrez goes over the workflow changes to enable better colloboration and covers the email "command line" functionality they've added so that users can work with tickets on their phones. He also goes over the user-centric portal that Spiceworks 4.0 offers, giving the start of a knowledge base and a way to encourage self-service IT. Finally, we go over one of the most highly requested features, the network map which shows a visual network topology.

Also, check out the demo.

Disclosure: Spiceworks is a client.

Rare Footage

See here.

Michael Wilde on Splunking the Cloud - CloudCampAustin Interviews 2

While our audio recording equipment was having a nap at CloudCampAustin, I whipped out the video camera to talk with Michael Wilde of Splunk. Being at CloudCampAustin, we end up discussing how Splunk fits into all this cloud computing stuff: here, the point Michael lays out is that you've still got basic IT infrastructure to worry about and shift through, namely logs.

Having worked at Tivoli in the past, I ask Michael to compare the traditional, Big 4 way of doing IT Management with how folks like Splunk and other "Systems Management 2.0" (to use an old moniker) folks do it. It's sort of a best-of-breed vs. unified suite discussion. Him living in Dripping Springs, I ask him about a new vodka from there I've been seeing around Austin.

Disclosure: Splunk is a client.

Michael Wilde on CloudCampAustin

I get Splunk's Michael Wilde to talk about CloudCampAustin as a excuse to show off one of his corny iPhone apps.

Prashant Ketkar on Microsoft Azure - MIX09

While at MIX09 accompanied by a rockin' sound-track from the Rock Band mega-stage down the hallway, I talked with Prashant Ketkar about Microsoft's cloud platform, Azure.

After nailing down the proper pronunciation of "Azure," I ask Prashant to give us an overview of Azure. We then get into a discussion of the PaaS aspects of Azure and the overall ecosystem that may develop including partner opportunities and roles. I ask Prashant what the developer experience is like: that is, getting started with using Azure. We then briefly touch on the slightly different development concerns when deploying to the cloud.

Finally, we go over the current feature set of Azure and look outwards at it's road-map, some items of which will announced this coming summer, esp. the pricing structure for Azure.

Disclosure: Microsoft paid T&E to MIX09 and sponsored this video.

Data in the cloud - Patric McElroy on Databases and Data Services in Azure - MIX09

While at MIX09 this year, I had the chance to talk with Microsoft's Patric McElroy. We start out talking about how Microsoft data services map into cloud computing. While we discuss how existing technologies and techniques are migrated to Microsoft Azure, we also talk about the new functionality that comes with being hosted in the cloud: e.g., self-service provisioning, High Availability, Disaster Recovery, and scaling data up (performance wise) to meet high data demands.

I then ask Patric if there's cloud technologies and techniques that they're pulling back to on-premise software. There's some interesting tooling and provisioning tasks he tells us about. We also discuss how the role of the DBA may or may not be impacted in the Azure world. We wrap-up by talking about ADO.NET Data Services (or "Project Astoria," as I remember it), primarily how the RESTful entity mapping framework fits into Azure.

Disclosure: Microsoft covered Tamp;E for MIX09 and sponsored this video.

Network management with SolarWinds, with Josh Stephens

While visiting with RedMonk client SolarWinds recently I recorded a super-short interview with Josh Stephens, SolarWinds "Head Geek."

I asked him to go over SolarWinds portfolio of products, define exactly what "network management" is, and then show us a quick preview of their newly announced personal dashboard, Workspace Studio, an addition to the Engineer's Toolkit.

Disclosure: SolarWinds is a client.

Chris O'Connor's Presentation at Pulse 2009

Chris O'Connor is VP Strategy & Market Development, Tivoli Software. Chris gave a spectacular demo presentation at Pulse 2009 on energy efficiency in the enterprise. IBM were good enough to give us a copy of his presentation for posting here.

Industry Solutions with Dave Bartlett & Gaston Sandoval

(Watch the video by clicking play above, or subscribe to the RedMonkTV podcast feed to have this episode and others downloaded automatically for you.)

While at Pulse 2009 last week I had the chance to talk with IBM's Dave Bartlett and Gaston Sandoval about the Industry Solutions Tivoli have been talking about recently. Here, I you get the chance to hear what exactly these Industry Solutions are, go over some examples of them in use, and hear how IBM is creating them.

We start out talking about what the Industry Frameworks are exactly. After going over a broad overview, I ask a low-level question about what makes this possible: is it that "everything" is IP addressable now, on a network? The answer is a nuanced "yes." We then discuss what these frameworks look like in other industries, such as energy, for example, on offshore oil platforms. I then ask what the stack looks like - the boxes and arrows, if you will.

This gets into a discussion of how the team has devised the frameworks, with a mandate to draw on existing technology rather than invent news ones exclusively. We then talk about how IBM gathered up this industry specific knowledge, and how they've been maintaining it. As with all IBM offerings, the topic of cross-brand cooperation comes up as well.

We then go over an example of what this looks like using one of IBM's more popular examples, utility management down to the power-line level and "smart grids." The vision here is to start delivering new services on-top of traditional electricity delivery. Here, the thinking gets into classic open platform theory: if you open up a previously closed platform - a black-box - there's more possibility for innovation on-top of that platform without being threatened by the Innovator's Dilemma.

You might also be interested in this previous interview with IBM's Karen Parrish on the topic. As more background, also see this piece from Dave.

Disclosure: IBM is a client and sponsored this video.

Lauren States on Cloud Computing

While I was at IBM Pulse this year, I had the chance to sit down with Lauren States who's title describes what she does quiet well: Vice President Cloud Computing for IBM's Software Group.

In this brief discussion, we cover several topics:

Pulse 2009 cloud related product and consulting announcements
Does Conway's Law apply to cloud setups?
Mixing public and private clouds - one us it for spilling over peak workload to public clouds - use often begins with testing and QA and spreads closer to production deployments.
The decision process Lauren has seen companies go through around public vs. private clouds.
What types of applications - or "work-loads," even - has Lauren seen running on clouds? This gets us into some interesting talk of how verticals might driving cloud use with more tailored, SaaS-delivered applications.
Cloud computing might drive simplification, standardization, and maybe just "good enough."
Tailoring the operations vs. the user interfaces for cloud computing - a little more complex for ops people, but much simpler for users.
The cost savings angle - internal IBM folks used cloud technology to bring costs down 83%.

Disclosure: IBM is a client and sponsored this video.

Pulse 09 Day 01 - John Willis

Right after getting James' take on the first day of IBM Tivoli Pulse, I got John Willis'. While he touches on the broader vision plays, he talks mostly about his take on the cloud computing discussion of the day.

Disclosure: IBM is a client and paid T&E to Pulse 2009.

Pulse09 Day 01 - James Governor

Mid-day during the first day of IBM's Tivoli user conference, Pulse 2009, I talked with our very own James Governor about his quick impressions on the morning's keynote.

He starts out talking about Tivoli's Industry Frameworks, which, as he says, is about IBM Software Group selling applications but not calling them "applications." Indeed, as a Q&A session on that topic later in the day evoked, it's a sort of semantic issues best discussed "over drinks," as one exec put it.

We then get into a short discussion of Tivoli's Dynamic Infrastructure story which, according to James, is all about bringing SOA together with IT Service Management ("ITSM" as he says). I ask how he thinks this fits in with older IBM ideas like Autonomic computing.

Finally, we wrap-up discussing the Tivoli cloud computing story we've been seeing evolve here at Pulse. James is (still) not too happy with the IBM cloud story. That said, he suggests pulling in the OnDemand phrase and discussion from the past, the content of which he liked. I add in that the cloud computing discussion seems to be around what cloud means for operations people, not end-users, where you'd expect to hear more from the Lotus folks (as we did back at Lotusphere this year).

Disclosure: IBM is a client and paid T&E to Pulse 2009.