1. All of the data below has been contributed by vExperts themselves or has been pulled from public sources like Twitter and LinkedIn.  I wasn’t given any information about the vExpert group by VMware other than the publicly shared list.
2. The graphics I’m using below are dynamic and will update themselves (on refresh) as data is added or changed on the primary Google Spreadsheet.  There are about 200 or so records that haven’t been updated yet, so the stats will change as those people add their information!  If you think/know the numbers are wrong, have a vExpert log in and update the data!
3. The link to the Google Spreadsheet is in the vExpert forum on VMTN and is only available to vExperts.

With that out of the way, let’s look at some of the data!

• While the vExpert team is still predominately based in the USA, the number of foreign-based award winners is pretty impressive.
• Twitter is increasingly becoming a must-have for vExperts.
• 330 of 577 vExperts have a blog or other online presence listed
• 67 people have been awarded the vExpert designation for all five years of the program
• 45 have been awarded for four years
• 83 have been awarded for three years
• 131 were awarded the vExpert for the second time
• 250 were awarded for the first time.  There may also be some people who were awarded in 2009 and 2010 who are coming back to the program after a two year absence, but since that data wasn’t included with the list this year we won’t know until those folks update the spreadsheet…
• 461 of 577 vExperts have their employer publicly available.  They are employed by a total of 302 different companies, and the breakdown looks like this:
  I think that some of these companies deserve a lot of credit.  Veeam added two additional members this year, leading the list of VMware software partners.  Varrow decisively took over the lead for VMware partners, doubling their number of vExperts to 8, and HP increased theirs to 9!  VCE (my employer) also made big strides, adding 7 more vExperts to lead all companies other than VMware and EMC with 12 total!Also notable is that while VMware grew their number significantly, from 33 to 55, EMC decreased to 17, possibly coinciding with the re-organization of the vSpecialist team and the number of people who moved from EMC to VMware.
• 34 companies had multiple vExperts on staff
• 269 companies had one vExpert on staff
• A total of 302 companies world-wide have a vExpert on staff!

As in past years, I’m very happy to be part of this group.  It really is both a recognition of the effort put in and a platform to be able to give back even more to the community.  In 2011 I was shocked that I was included, in 2012 I was surprised, and now in 2013 I feel like I understand my role.  Thank you to all of our friends at VMware that make this program possible, and thank you for letting me part of it!

[UPDATED]

Luc Dekens had made a comment below about being interested in the vExpert “density” per capita in each of the countries represented.  Once he gave me a link to a Google Spreadsheet with global population data in it, I couldn’t resist.  It required me to teach myself the Google Visualization API Query Language, which was fun, but I got the data he wanted (Please note, these percentages are per 1,000 people, so if you want to see the percentage of the actual population, you’ll need to add three zeros after the decimal point.  I’ve left it this way because it’s easier to chart the numbers, but thank you to Jimmy Hester for pointing out the math in the comments!) :

As you can see, Iceland takes the cake with 0.3% of the entire population of the country holding a vExpert designation. :-) Luc’s guess about the Netherlands was close, but they ended up tied for second with Luxembourg! Any other stats you’d like to see?

Tactically, the VCE Developer Portal is a way for operations and infrastructure people to learn about the software and APIs that VCE has developed to assist in the consumption of the Vblock Systems, to meet and interact with a community of people who are doing the same thing and to share code and methods.  It’s designed for developers and it’s where all of the VCE developer teams can participate directly with the community.

The portal includes two primary sections, one that provides a structured collection of all of the tools and materials that a developer would need to develop against the VCE Vision API, including the VCE Vision Intelligent Operations SDK.  The other, the developer community, is where the people live, creating new ways to leverage the platform to help align IT and IT infrastructure with the business goals they are supporting.

The best part about the community is that it’s open to the public, not just to VCE employees, partners and customers.  Sure, VCE is the first company to start pushing the concept of using APIs to provide intelligent information about converged infrastructure, but we’re convinced we won’t be the last.  The feedback from customers has been too overwhelmingly positive, and much like we saw the majority of hardware providers scramble to introduce something that looked like a Vblock System after they saw the success we had, it’s only a matter of time before having a CI API becomes table stakes for all of the other players in this space.  For the vendors who have made an art form out of avoiding any investment in the management plane of their reference architecture, or for the vendors who struggle mightily to integrate the dozens of software-based management tools they have acquired over the decades into a coherent and cohesive product for customers to use, this may be a tall order.

So why is this important?  Why do I think this is such a milestone for VCE?  Come over here, I’ll tell you a secret:

VCE is now, finally, a software company.

Sure, Vblock Systems include a whole bunch of hardware.  They have to, because enterprise applications need to run somewhere!  Customers, by and large, don’t care about the infrastructure, but they understand that it’s not easy, and that it’s critical to the success of the enterprise applications that sit on top of it.  Someone is going to have to put the pieces together, someone is going to have to validate the architecture, someone is going to have to help with software and firmware validation, and we might as well.  Infrastructure is boring, but it’s still damn hard work.

But look at what VCE is doing to provide value on top of that boring hardware:

1. In-house development of a full quoting platform, the VCE Advanced Configuration Tool, that allows for validation and quoting of a multi-vendor, standardized product that may consist of hundreds of individual line item SKUs.  Sure, it started out as an Excel macro, but we’ve polished it up a bit since then. :-)
2. Full software and firmware regression testing for every piece of code running on top of the hardware, including the applications customers use most;
3. Full development of the logical configuration that’s being laid down to support customer applications;
4. In-house development of the patented code used to integrate the VMware, Cisco and EMC ticketing systems to provide customers with a real unified support experience.  This was a multi-million dollar investment made by VCE very, very early on, and one that has continued to pay dividends.  If you really think that a “cooperative” support model or a 3rd party who is taking a call from a customer and then opening multiple tickets with vendors is the same thing, I invite you to visit the VCE call center in Richardson, TX to learn more!
5. In-house development of the entire VCE Vision Intelligent Operations software stack, including:
   1. The VCE System Library for Vblock Systems, which provides the discovery and compliance engines as well as the object model used in the discovery process;
   2. The VCE Vision Intelligent Operations SDK, including the API and associated documentation, all of the sample code, the Java binding and the Vblock System simulator;
   3. The Vblock System plugin for VMware vCenter Server, which provides inventory reporting, health diagnostics, compliance checking and reporting and direct access to the element managers for provisioning and administration tasks;
   4. The Vblock System adapter for VMware vCenter Operations Manager, which provides physical and virtual troubleshooting information, capacity and performance monitoring, reporting and trending over time

Look, I’m not going to pretend that we are anywhere near as good at this as we will become over time, and I’m not going to tell you that we don’t have a lot of work in front of us.  George Reese would not be happy with this API, I’m sure, even with all of that Dell money cheering him up.  The amount of effort that is going into trying to hit release dates and maintain the features that are being requested is almost overwhelming (by the way, we are hiring the CRAP out of developers in the Raleigh area).  That said, don’t underestimate the accomplishment that is taking a joint venture that was created to package and resell hardware and turning it into a company with over $1 billion in sales that will make a significant amount of revenue from the development and delivery of unique software.  The executive leadership at VCE, especially Todd Pavone and his team, deserve a lot of credit for seeing where the customer value target was going and pushing the organization in that direction.  It hasn’t been easy, nor even fun at times, but the opening of the developer community is itself a huge validation of the work they’ve done.

So now, the fun begins for real. Whether software development is part of your job or just a hobby you’re passionate about, please be sure to visit the Developer Portal and contribute.  If you are a VCE customer, and you need to start educating your team about APIs and how they are the language of development and operations in a converged world, this is where you need to go.  If you are a competitor and want to see what we’re doing, you can come too!  If you want to talk with awesome VCE development employees like Josh Bonczkowski, it looks like they even gave him his own blog on the site! An open and inviting community is the best kind, and I openly invite you all to participate and see what happens when you take the best, most boring hardware on the planet and wrap it in an API.  No, it’s not software defined infrastructure (don’t get me started), but it’s certainly software accessible, programmatically available hardware, and that’s  a huge step in the right direction.

That said, the world is changing.  I’ve been part of the movement to make infrastructure boring, and having started to see that come to pass, the interesting stuff is increasingly upstream.  Of course the cost of entry upstream is that it’s inhabited by the folks who have been toiling away on the software.  The left hand is finally getting to meet the right hand, and the results are…interesting.

I am a regular at infrastructure conferences.  EMC World, VMworld, and Cisco Live are the core conferences of my profession, along with their Gartner, Interop and GigaOM counterparts.  I have gone to software conferences, but they have typically been the large, enterprise software vendors like SAP and CA, who have almost become part of the infrastructure at this point.  OpenStack Summit 2013 in Portland was my first “real” software conference, where the majority of the people attending actually were involved with the creation of the software in question.  And I’m here to report that it wasn’t at all what I expected.  Not even close.  Here’s what I learned:

1. The conference was for real.  I expected more or less what I’d heard about San Diego.  A few people, some super-technical sessions that droned on about brokers and debated the merits of Linux distributions.  What I found was close to (or slightly exceeding) 3,000 people, a series of well thought out sessions, a more-or-less consistent theme to the show and a venue that was filled to capacity.  In fact, there was more bitching about the fact that it was damn near impossible to go to back-to-back sessions than there was about the quality of the sessions themselves.  Of course, I found the trick:
   

   I found the secret to getting a seat for in the popular sessions at #OpenStack: show up an hour early and enjoy the lightning talks first!

   — Jeramiah Dooley (@jdooley_clt) April 17, 2013

   That doesn’t mean the conference doesn’t have a ways to go.  There were a significant number of “pay-to-play” sessions, and the general organization around the keynotes was pretty simplistic.  They also need to figure out how better to accommodate the fact that half of the show is people with their heads down coding, with the other half which is the vendor showroom, the sessions and the networking.  Definitely not a bad start though.

2. The community is extraordinarily well organized.  Amazingly so, considering the mix of people and priorities.  A lot of credit here goes to Rackspace and the Foundation, who have demanded quality and coordination from early on.  The way the work is broken into teams, the way each team has a representative, the process by which code is committed, all of these things were a surprise to me.  It’s not a bunch of coders with GitHub accounts.  Not by a long shot.
3. OpenStack itself, with the Grizzly release, is not perfect, but it is functional in the right environment.  Make no mistake, putting and keeping OpenStack in production isn’t a trivial task today, even with a limited number of workloads.  The cost of the implementation and support of these environments is still too high, and while the integration vendors have started shaking themselves out, there’s a sense that it’s all “consulting value” and not any real differentiation in the product itself.  Complicating this is that too much customization breaks the core of the platform and creates interoperability issues.  The ecosystem has to find out where they can monetize the interaction, and how they can compete for customers.
4. The vendors have arrived.  As expected, the big players were here this week, in force.  HP, IBM, Dell, EMC, Cisco, VMware, Red Hat, Microsoft and more all played big roles in the event, which was good on one hand and difficult on the other.  The presence of those companies will start the process of overcoming the hesitance of the enterprise customers, but it clearly frustrated some of the developers in attendance that there were things being done that weren’t being shared with the community.  The companies who can bridge that trust gap (Red Hat and VMware seem to have done well this week) will be the vendors that the community gravitates to.
5. Like it or not, VMware is the key to pushing OpenStack into the Enterprise.  Yes, the majority of deployments today are using KVM.  The challenge is that it’s difficult to make a case for KVM to an enterprise that has already invested in VMware, and with 100% of the Fortune 1000 using VMware for some workloads that’s a huge number of companies that will struggle to adopt OpenStack in its current form.  For them, there’s no evolutionary way to move forward.  Yet.  It was fascinating to speak with members of the OpenStack Foundation and hear how much value they see in VMware being involved.  Today, they have done a wonderful job spreading the word of OpenStack to the “anti-enterprise”: the early dev/ops adopters, the CD/CI development teams, the web-scale companies, the AWS users, etc…  While we are starting to see, and the Foundation went to great pains to point them out, enterprise adopters, even those use cases were limited.  Best Buy wasn’t moving to OpenStack for their IT environment, they are moving their web application.  Samsung wasn’t moving their messaging, payroll, HR and finance apps to OpenStack, they were moving their scale out development apps.  For OpenStack to become more than the defacto platform for the “anti-enterprise”, they need to be able to piggyback on VMware.  Let’s face it, VMware has gone through this process with the enterprise before, offering an evolutionary “path to the cloud” specifically as the alternative to rewriting applications and changing cost models.  The “Three Paths to the Cloud” and “Journey to the Cloud” are narratives that VMware have used to help customers evolve from the data center owning, hardware buying enterprises to the private cloud/hybrid cloud customers of today.  I know that no one likes to hear it, but VMware is the key.  It won’t be easy for them, because in order to embrace this framework there’s some significant changes they will have to make in their revenue streams, but it has to happen if OpenStack wants to progress quickly.
6. Rackspace has pulled off a miracle.  I’m not sure exactly how, but Rackspace gets credit for letting go of OpenStack enough to let the community thrive, for providing one of the more solid distributions out there (Quantum interop aside), for providing a ton of code back to the project and for being one of the more progressive and aggressive OpenStack shops.  That’s a hell of a magic trick.  Of course, they’ve earned it. Whether it was well designed strategy or good luck, Rackspace stands at the head of the class with OpenStack customers, especially after their announcement targeted at service providers. Also, they easily threw the best party in Portland, so they have that going for them…

Overall, consider me converted.  I went expecting a bunch of developers trying hard to be grownups, and I walked away impressed with the depth of talent, scope of ambition, level of organization and amount of energy this community has.  If OpenStack wasn’t on your radar before, I suggest you start looking into it.  Me?  I’ll be learning how to write code.

What really caught my eye and got me thinking was one of the signs that had been posted around the school:

The Chain Reaction of Kindness Starts with Me. On one hand, it’s a great reminder of how we are the change we want to see, and how effort is required to make that change happen.  The US political system is a great example of how this basic message has been lost for an entire generation of people.  We’d much rather complain on Facebook and make funny pictures to share on the internet than actually get our hands dirty.  Use all the excuses that you want to, we are the reason things are the way they are.  Don’t like it?  Get off your ass and start a chain reaction.

There are chain reactions in tech, too.  A good startup is a chain reaction.  A group of users asking for something new can start a chain reaction.  Companies deciding to stop being beholden to the status quo, deciding to go to market in a new way, choosing not to play the negative marketing game…all of these can be ways to start a chain reaction.  The people who have the talent, dedication and drive to start these chain reactions in tech are special.  They start with a good idea and a lot of caffeine and end up being the legends of the industry.  Not everyone can, or should, try.

However, I’m coming to realize that you have to start a chain reaction to participate meaningfully in one.  Starting a chain reaction, or trying to, has a real cost, and not everyone has the ability to pay it.  Some leave the starting to others, and then join in to amplify when their comfort level permits.  Of course, the more mature the chain reaction is when you join it, the less you get out of it, in both tech and in life.  Personally, I’m not in a place financially to be able to start my own company, no matter how much I’d like to.  Over my career, however, I’ve been willing to sign on to someone else’s idea early on in the process.  I’m willing to be the first person through the wall for an idea I believe in, even if that process always involves a little blood loss.

Of course there are people who don’t want to be part of the chain reaction process at all.  They show up for work at 8:30am every morning, shutting down and going home at 5:00pm like clock-work.  They exist their entire careers without ever taking a chance, or buying into someone else’s idea.  I meet lots and lots of people like this as part of my job, working for both enterprise customers as well as large vendors.  Don’t make waves.  Don’t push too hard.  Do what you have to do, complain about how bad things are for you, mock the lack of vision of the people in management, but never, ever pop your head up over the cube wall.  Don’t, under any circumstances, let a monkey up the stairs.

One of the small ways that I’ve been trying to help participate in a chain reaction is in the realm of competitive marketing.  The Office of the CTO is an integral part of our competitive team at VCE.  Trey Layton really deserves the credit for being the first one through the wall on this, but it’s been interesting to see the responses, internally and externally.  Basically, the idea is that our company will never create a competitive comparison document that is designed for customer consumption.  We will create documents to help the field teams understand how we differentiate against competitive offerings, but we’ll be as factual in those comparisons as possible.  Why?  Because they can only come back to hurt you.  The minute the information gets into customer hands it’s outdated, and all the competition as to do is show that it’s outdated and you lose credibility, and that goes especially for direct-to-customer communication via social media.  For example, when you Tweet things like this:

All it takes is someone showing that the articles you referenced are months old, that the company involved has more than broken even on the investments that it’s investors have made, that both of it’s primary investors mentioned it exclusively during their (positively received) calls with investors and that the basic lack of math skills is embarrassing, and your credibility is shot.  You are forever labeled as a FUD slinger.

The same goes with those competitive presentations that HP, IBM, EMC and NetApp like to use.  You can’t be current on every development your competition makes, and it’s so easy to use one mistake or outdated “fact” to discredit the entire document.  There is no upside.  So we don’t make them.  We tell customers we don’t make them.  We compete on our value and that of our technology.

Even better, in my mind, is that we walk the walk internally too.  Email exchanges like this happen every week inside VCE, and the response is always the same…

Professionally, this is a chain reaction that I want to be part of.  We can compete with each other without being disrespectful and without knowingly spreading FUD.  You just have to choose to.

There are other chain reactions I want to be part of, some personal and some professional. What about you?

Ken has really committed himself to being a content creator over the last few months, and put out a couple great blog posts about our launch on the 21st.  This one, titled Because Infrastructure is Boring, went up yesterday, and I retweeted it with a picture attached:

This was a keynote that I gave at the Omaha VMUG in June of 2010, and it’s notable for one specific reason.  It was, to my knowledge, the first time we publicly outed what has finally been formally announced as the VCE Vision Intelligent Operations software.  Of course I had to be sneaky about it, and we couldn’t come right out and announce things.  I’m working on another blog post around the story of how VCE Vision came to be, so we don’t need to dig into the details here…

Using a “Unicorns and Rainbows” slide as my disclaimer, I shared the first ever screenshots of the now public vCenter and vCenter Operations Manager integration.  If you remember, in June of 2010 VMware hadn’t announced vSphere 5.1 or the next-gen client yet, so even putting up a disguised screenshot was a pretty big deal at that point, especially at a VMware event.

The response that Jay and I got from the attendees was great.  Lots of people furiously trying to think through what it meant, and how it could be leveraged, lots of polite deflection from us and promises to release more info when we could while insisting that it was real…

In late April of that year I went out and gave the overview of that VCE Vision could be to Colin McNamara and the Nexus IS team.  In May, at EMC World, Trey Layton and I showed Colin the first cut of the vCenter plugin demo video, and his response was priceless and borderline inappropriate (which isn’t all that surprising if you know Colin).

Part of the charter of our OCIO team is to bring a new context and message about the role of infrastructure to the market, not in a “coming down from the mountain way, it’s a much more grass roots effort.  Jay Cuthrell, the dearly departed and fondly remembered Steve Chambers and I spent more than a year going out and trying to change the conversation from the bottom up, knowing that at some point people will get the value of what we are doing, and start expecting it from all the players in the market.  As of yesterday, that gauntlet has clearly and publicly been thrown.  It’s not, however, a job with a lot of instant and immediate feedback, and so you have to trust yourself, the message and the team, and hope you see results over time.

You can see it happen when pieces of the message start showing up in the presentations and blog posts of people you respect.  When you hear sales people telling customers that no application user has ever cared what fabric switch, another quote I used in those early presentations.  When you see the competition franticly trying to align themselves with a market that your company pioneered, desperate to be classified in the same segment even if there’s no way they could ever make the investment that VCE has in how we do business.  When you see people you have an incredible amount of respect for, like Ken, using the message you put out almost a year earlier, and not even remembering where it started, that’s when all of the effort and travelling and time are worth it.

Like the Queen Mary II, our industry is huge and lumbering and takes a long time and a lot of pushing to change directions, but it can be done.  Every once in a while I look up and see that the wind is blowing from a different direction, and the stars have shifted.  That’s why I love my job.

From an audience perspective, I interact with two groups of people who have very different content needs and risk factors.  On one hand I have my friends and family.  From a risk standpoint these folks are pretty safe.  I’m related to the majority of them (much to their chagrin, at times), I know where most everyone lives and I have a personal relationship with each of them at some level.  They would all be welcome to come to my house. Content-wise, this is the group that wants to see pictures of the kids, they want to see vacation videos and they want family updates and news.  There’s a fair bit of political and religious discussion in this group, although I reserve most of those rants for private, invitation-only groups if for no other reason than to make sure my brother Joe Dooley still speaks to me on occasion.

The professional folks are more of a wild card.  Many of the Facebook requests I get come from people that I know very little, and some of them are from people I’ve never met in person.  This isn’t to say they are bad people, but they are not necessarily folks who need family updates and vacation pictures.  The conversation with these folks is more centered around technology, industry events, what pink drink I’m currently imbibing, which bar everyone is meeting at and other “professional” topics of conversations.  Less politics and religion, although some, more Foursquare check-in and badge sharing.

From a tools perspective, I have six major platforms that I leverage: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WordPress, TripIt and Foursquare.  Together they provide the audience (Facebook/Twitter) and content that I use regularly.  There are other platforms that I use, like LinkedIn and Google+, but I don’t leverage them as primary sources of content, more as broadcast tools.  The question is how to subdivide each to service the different people in my network.

The first option is just to create separate accounts for each audience.  Some people do this well, but for me it seems like an awful lot of work.  It’s excellent at maintaining separation, but some applications, particularly those used on mobile devices, are worse than others at managing multiple accounts.  Having to log out of one account and into another to post the same picture to both audiences sounds like my idea of hell.  Multiple accounts isn’t for me.

The next option is serving a single audience with a single platform.  I debated using Facebook strictly for family and friends, and use Twitter and maybe something like Google+ for all of the professional communication.  When talking with people, this seems to be the most common form of air-gapping.  For me though, this is only a small step less painful that the first option, with the added pain of not being able to leverage each platform for it’s strengths.  You still have multiple accounts to manage, you still have to be conscious of what you are posting where manage multiple mobile apps and logins.

In the end, I decided to use Facebook groups to segregate professional contacts from personal contacts.  Facebook posts and pictures as well as Instagram posts will all default to a more restricted visibility, with only the personal group being able to see them.  Foursquare check-ins will be visible to both groups, and LinkedIn and TripIt updates will be seen by the professional group only.  Twitter will remain a non-filtered jungle where I’ll have real-time conversations with both groups as they want (that’s the beauty of being an “opt-in” service, you only get what you want to get).

Once that plan was in place, putting into practice became the challenge.  In the end, to the surprise of no one, the biggest challenge was simply finding out what was possible in Facebook, and where in the labyrinth of the privacy menu to find the options you needed.  What I’m going to do here is give you an overview of what I did, how I implemented it and some interesting caveats I discovered along the way.

IMPORTANT NOTE: All of this information is available elsewhere, from people who are probably far better at it than I am.  I’m not trying to say this is the best, only or recommended way to accomplish the goal, just that it’s how I did it.  Enough people asked for more information that I decided to put it all here.  Take what you need, ignore the rest.

Part 1: Creating the List

First thing we need to do is create the list we are going to use. In my case, I created a list called “Professional” and then selected all of the members that needed to be in it. To create the list, hover over the “Friends” section on the left menu of your default home view. When you do, the word “MORE” will appear, click on it.

Here we see all of your existing lists. Unless you’ve created lists before, everything here will have been automatically created by Facebook based on your profile. You’ll have one for each employer you listed, and one for each school. Click the button labeled “Create List” at the top right.

Name the list however you’d like. Don’t add any members yet, this is the worst possible interface for doing that.

Select the newly created list and you’ll see a button labeled “Manage List” at the top right of the screen.  Click on it and select “Edit List” You’d think that you could use the “edit” pencil, but no, that’s just for renaming.  You’ll be given a menu where you can go through all of your friends in alphabetical order and click on the ones you want to be in your new list.  I also took this opportunity to do some general weeding, and probably unfriended 50 people in the process.  Once you get done, click the “finish” button at the bottom right.  Now you have your list.

Part 2: Setting Default Visibility

Next, we have to set the default visibility for new posts.  Up at the top right of your screen is a fairly new “privacy shortcuts” icon.  Click on it and choose “See More Settings” at the bottom.

The very first choice you see, “Who can see my stuff?” is where we are going to start.  Click on “Who can see your future posts?”, choose the dropdown and click on “Custom”.

On the screen that comes up, you are going to set the default visibility for all posts made through all Facebook apps.  For mine, I chose to use my standard “Friends” list as the basis for sharing.  I’m not big on the “Public” setting for obvious reasons.  In the bottom section I’ve added my “Professional” list to the list of people I don’t want to share with by default.  What this means is that when I post something, only my personal friends are going to see it.  I can change this setting on a per-post or per-app basis (more on this later) if I want to change the visibility.  When you are done, click the “Save Changes” button.

While we are in the Privacy Settings, there are probably a couple other things you want to look at.  If you click on the “Timeline and Tagging” item on the left, you’ll see a couple settings you might want to verify.

• “Who can post on your timeline?”
• “Review posts friends tag you in before they appear on your timeline?” – I found this to be less useful than I imagined.  It allows me to approve or disapprove things I’ve been tagged in to show up in my timeline, but doesn’t allow me to actually choose whether I’m tagged.
• “Who can see posts you’ve been tagged in on your timeline?” – I use the same visibility here as I do for new posts.  I don’t want a personal friend tagging me in something and then having that be visible to my “Professional” list.
• “Who can see what others post on your timeline?”
• “Review tags people add to your own posts before the tags appear on Facebook?” – I choose to review everything I’m tagged in before they show up on Facebook.  Part of this is because you can’t control how someone else sets the permissions on their pictures, and if they choose to share with “Public” or “Friends of Friends” than this gives you the ability to untag yourself before the picture goes live.
• “When you’re tagged in a post, who do you want to add to the audience if they aren’t already in it?” – This is much like the previous one, where if I’m tagged, I don’t want to add any additional audience to the item.
• “Who sees tag suggestions when photos that look like you are uploaded?” – No, no, and more no.

Back under the “Privacy” menu, there’s an item called “Limit the audience for posts you’ve shared with friends of friends or Public?” If you have been using Facebook for a while, this may be something you want to look into.  If you have been using “Public” as your default visibility, or if you’ve been tagging photos and allowing “Friends of Friends” to see them, this is the only way to mass-change those permissions back to use just “Friends”.  I didn’t have to use this, since I’d always avoided “Public” and “Friends of Friends”, but it’s an easy (if permanent) undo button if you need it.

Part 3: Managing Apps

The next part of the problem is how to manage apps.  I struggled here for a long time, thinking I needed to be able to set the default visibility directly in the app itself, leading to much frustration.  Luckily, there’s a MUCH easier way to do it, you just have to dig a little.

First, go back to the “Privacy Settings and Tools” section, and click on “Apps” on the left side menu.  You may have to click on “Show All Apps” but you’ll see every app that you have authorized with your account.  The ones I was specifically interested in were TripIt, Foursquare, Instagram and the tool I use to share new blog posts.  Click on the App you want, and you can set the visibility just like we did for the default posts.

In my case, I have TripIt, Foursquare and Linkedin posting only to my “Professional” list and I have Instagram posting only to my personal friends.  Your list of apps and how you want to use them may vary, but here’s where you set them all.  You can also use this chance to delete any of the apps you don’t use anymore.

Part 4: Cleaning Up Your Past

While the previous parts of this were an exercise in navigating the bowels of Facebook, this part is pure tedium.  Now that we have new content showing up the way we want, we have to go back and clean up the old stuff.  This is where the “undo” button I referenced earlier might come in handy, but you’ll still have to go through and hide everything you don’t want visible to your “Professional” list.

Fortunately, there are a couple tricks you can use here.  The first is the “View As” tool, located under the “Privacy Shortcuts” menu in the “Who can see my stuff?” section.  This is a very useful tool that allows you to view your timeline in the context as anyone in your friend list, meaning you can make changes to existing content and then test to make sure it had the intended effect.

The next tool that is useful is the “Activity Log”. You can find it on the profile screen, on the top, right side of the screen.

In the activity log you can see every single thing you’ve ever done on Facebook.  You can also do some rudimentary sorting and classification using the menu on the left.  In my case, I needed to reset the visibility on every Instagram post I’d made using my new settings.  I clicked on the “More” link underneath “All Apps” on the left menu, and then selected Instagram.  I then went through all 280+ images and set the privacy settings.

I then went through all of my photos and changed the visibility on anything that included a picture of member of my family.  If you have your pictures organized into custom albums, you can set the permission on the entire album, but for the “Mobile Uploads” album and any album created by an app that uploads pictures you are forced to address them one at a time.  This was BY FAR the most painful part of the process, and took the better part of four hours to complete.

Finally, at the end, I have a sustainable system that introduces minimal added work into the sharing process that segments my friends into appropriate.  I’m sure there will need to be mid-course corrections along the way, and maybe I’ll even introduce a couple new lists as I start to use new apps, but this is much, much better than it was a couple days ago and I’m pretty happy!  I finished up by sending every one of my friends a quick Facebook post letting them know what I was doing, and which group they were put into.  I wanted to give them a chance to provide feedback, and there were a number of people that I ended up having great conversations with about which group they wanted to be in.  All-in-all I was happy with how it turned out.  Thank you to all of you who helped with the design and execution of this, I really appreciate your input!

How do you use social media to serve work and home audiences?  Did I miss anything?  Do you have a better way of doing things?  Use the comments below and let me know!

I also realize that this last year has aged me in many ways.

My incredible, amazing, indefatigable teammate Jay Cuthrell says “VCE is all about riding the rocket while constructing and reworking that same rocket in real time.”  He’s not wrong, I’d just add that we have a tendency to do that construction and reworking while sipping a cocktail, eating prodigious amounts of meat, using three different social media platforms at once, researching a dozen new technologies, tweaking customer presentations and trying desperately to keep everyone’s names straight.  Don’t try this at home.  No really, don’t.

It’s been fantastic to watch the VCE organism coalesce into a multi-national, snarky, hard-working, sharing (mostly) by default, channel-agnostic group of technical superstars.  We knew going in that the vArchitect role was going to be an incredibly hard one to hire for, and an even harder one to keep.  Trust me, there are many people who have interviewed for those positions and not made the grade, but those that have risen to the top are some of the most impressive pre-sales architects I’ve ever met.  I’d name names, but there’s no way I’d remember them all, and it would just serve as a list for some recruiter to use.  Being fluent in one data center technology is hard, being fluent in three plus all of the enterprise applications that our customers use AND able to communicate and any level of discussion from nerd knobs to executive summaries is both difficult and the only way to be successful at VCE.  My hat is off to those guys and girls and the tremendous amount of work they put in.  They are the true magic that keeps the VCE rocket in the air.

Speaking of “in the air” holy cow have I seen the inside of a lot of airplanes this year.  I traveled as much in 2012 than I have in the rest of my lifetime combined, and there is definitely a price to be paid.  It’s hard on the body, hard on the family and hard on maintaining a sense of space and time.  More than once I’ve woken up in another generic Marriott and wondered where I was and which time zone I was in.  While I love my job, and getting to travel and talk to customers and partners all over the globe is a dream come true, being away from my family is hard.  Luckily, I have the best partner I can think of to make sure things stay working at home while I’m gone.  Every time we go somewhere and I see how other kids act I’m reminded of the wonderful job my wife does with the kids.  I’m very lucky.

I promised that I wouldn’t do a “predictions” column, and I intend to keep that.  No one cares what I think is going to happen next, and anything I told you would be biased because of who I am, where I work and the things I know.  Instead, let’s take another couple days to revel in the success that came in 2012:

1. VCE established clear leadership in the Converged Infrastructure space, dominating in market share and growth
2. I moved to a team within the company where I feel like a completely natural fit.  Being on a team where everyone shares in the burden, where everyone is a vested part of the “doers”, is an incredible (and rare) feeling.
3. I continued to find rooms where everyone is significantly smarter than I am. Thank goodness.

In the end, I met more good people, in more cool places than I ever expected.  To all of you who I talked to, drank with, shared a meal, a dance or a laugh: thank you.  Here’s to more of the same in 2013.

The first type of communities are the ones that are internal to a company.  These constructs are used to help facilitate internal discussion, cross-functional communication and projects and even to get employees a place to vent, self-support or interact with each other.  In my experience, these communities are generally located inside the firewall and are their success or failure is largely dependent on the tool used and how useful the implementation of that tool is to the discussions that are being had.  Most large companies, and certainly the ones I have experience with, do a fairly good job of this kind of community.  Interestingly, many of the most active communities inside Cisco, VMware and EMC have to do with supporting Apple laptops in a corporate environment, which invites a line of commentary that I’m not going to get into here.

The challenge with these communities is that I’ve never found one where the participants have a sense of ownership in a broad sense.  We participate in these communities, but we don’t belong to them in that we self-identify as a member of that community.  It’s a resource, like a library, but not one that we see the need to spend a lot of time investing in.  These communities end up being run by an off-shoot of the IT team, and while they are useful, we don’t necessarily miss them when we no longer have access to them.

The next type of communities are those that companies extend out to their customers.  John Troyer who runs the social media platforms for VMware, gave a great presentation at the Kansas City Regional VMUG this week about the reach and scope of the communities that exist as resources for VMware customers.  Obviously they have the incredibly popular VMTN Forums which average hundreds of posts a day, but it was interesting to me that John looks at non-VMware run sites like Experts-Exchange and others as extensions of the communities they have built organically.  The feeling was never that VMware was competing with outside communities, but was looking to make sure that customers had all of the resources and information they needed available in whatever form they chose to consume.

EMC and Cisco also have such communities available, but the differences are noteworthy.  Where the VMware communities and forums are literally the first two links at the top of the VMware website, EMC and Cisco position theirs as a part of their support services behind a dropdown at the top of the page.  Both companies also provide a text-based link at the bottom of the page too, but the communities are not positioned front and center as social spaces the way they are at VMworld.  While I haven’t been involved in this part of the Cisco strategy, I know that EMC has been working hard on enhancing their posture towards customer-based communities.  Folks like Matt Brender and others are working hard to build a framework that can be leveraged, and Chad Sakac has long championed the “Everything X at EMC” forums as a way to interact with customers and partners.

One of the primary differences here is that in a best case scenario the customers own the communities.  John Troyer surprised me when he acknowledged that there are no internal VMware FTEs dedicated to the VMTN forums; it’s completely run by the community, for the community.  That kind of self-sustaining model shows that the participants really see lasting value in belonging, and are willing to give back.

Both of these kinds of communities are focused on the social aspects of connecting companies with their employees, customers and partners, but there’s another kind of community that is becoming increasingly critical in traditional enterprises: a community of code. Of course, these communities aren’t new, especially to the OSS world, but they are both new and terrifying to old-school hardware vendors.  Dan Hushon shared with us the quote that OSS doesn’t succeed because it’s free; it succeeds because it’s transparent.  That rings true, but understand that neither of those things (giving things away free or being transparent) are part of the DNA of large, multi-national companies.  They just aren’t.

The need for this kind of community, in my opinion, one of the driving forces behind the announcement of The Pivotal Initiative by EMC and VMware.  If you look at every part of the spin-out that has been publicly announced, each of them has a deep and built-in need to have a community of people that is specifically tied to the codebase or language involved.  Greenplum needs the Chorus portion of the application, which allows for data scientists and BI specialists to collaborate and share on a project or company basis.  SpringSource is, at its core, a community, and needs to have it to flourish.  CloudFoundry, no matter what direction they decide to go in, need a closely knit and aligned set of customers and partners to allow that platform to fulfill its potential.

And those communities are inevitably going to need access to code.

The problem is that there are many logistical difficulties with giving away code inside enterprise structures that use a revenue model to relate to stock holders.  You can’t, in those constructs, spend money to give something away and keep it away from the stockholders for long.  Sooner or later, you have to generate a return on the investment that was made, or you need to close up shop.  I have used this graphic before, from Nick Weaver’s fantastic overview of Razor at PuppetConf, but it’s such a succinct statement on the problem that it keeps finding its way into the conversation.  Pivotal allows EMC and VMware to actually make strides towards opening up their portfolios to a larger degree of programmability without exposing their core business model.  It’s a hedge, on a grand scale, to see how and where they can embrace open source without impacting the stock price.

While this was a large and significant announcement, don’t think it’ll be the end of them.  The next shoe to drop was EMC becoming a corporate sponsor of OpenStack.  How many people would have predicted that a year ago? My bet is that we’ll also see significant strides on the programmability of the EMC storage arrays, and the collapsing of appliance based storage features (VPLEX, RecoverPoint, Avamar, DataDomain) into the mainstream storage product lines (VNX, VMAX, Isilon) as software features.  The use of vVols and other “object” based storage virtualization techniques will drive integration with VMware to new and interesting places.

And, my guess is that we’ll see Pivotal become a place where OSS and community-driven models can be tested and put into practice without running into legacy roadblocks of the process and people variety.  Finally.

Hurricane, then Superstorm, Sandy certainly affected all of us on the east coast to some degree or another.  Between friends, family and colleagues who were in harm’s way and travel plans that were disrupted, most of the people I know felt some impact from the storm.

There were many plotlines to the coverage of the storm as well.  Global warming, on-scene reporters being called reckless with their live shots, news folks falling for Photoshopped mock-ups of scuba divers in the subway.  It’s safe to say that any news-generating event is magnified when it includes New York City and New Jersey, and this one was no different.

There was also a lot of chatter in the circles I run in about data centers and how the storm was going to affect them.  For those of you who don’t know, there’s a LOT of data center space in Manhattan where more than a dozen providers have facilities.  Many of those were in the “Zone A” flood zone, but most of them were affected by power outages and limited fuel availability based on street closures.

From looking at the reports, it seems like one of the most common issues was an inability to pump fuel up to the generators which were located many, many floors up in high-rise buildings.   Most of these pumping facilities appear to be located on basement levels, and when those floors flooded the generators were stranded with the fuel they had access to locally.  Some, like the Peer 1 facility on 75 Broad St. also saw the flooding contaminate primary fuel supplies, leaving only “day tanks” to supply the generators.  The stories of customers spending days carrying fuel up flights of stairs to keep the generators running are pretty amazing.

There are, however, a few parts of the overall situation that bother me.  First, how was it that despite being located in a known flood zone, data center operators allowed a single point of failure like the fuel pumps to be located in a basement?  Sure, in hindsight it seems obvious, and the flooding was extraordinarily bad, but I’ll bet that there are a bunch of data center architects looking at ways to provide not just alternate pumps, but alternate ways to get fuel directly to the generators.

(Note: the picture to the right is the lobby of the Verizon data center at 140 West Street, taken Monday night.  All five basement levels flooded during the storm, and 3 and 1/2 of them were still underwater four days later.)

Second, it appears that the effort to keep the Peer 1 data center online was instigated and to a large extent carried out by customers, led by Anthony Casalena, the founder and CEO of Squarespace, not by the data center operations team themselves.  Once the adrenaline wears off, my guess is that there will be some customers wondering why THEY had to save the day on behalf of the provider they are paying princely sums to.  Robert Miggins, senior vice president of business development at Peer1, is quoted as saying “we wouldn’t have had the manpower there to actually bring the fuel up in time,” Miggins said. “There’s a lot of good will, and there’s a lot of hard work and there’s a few lucky bounces for good measure,” he said.  I’m sure there have been some incredibly hard working people from Peer 1 right there the whole time, but I don’t know how you take that statement as a good thing.  In the Squarespace updates you can also see that Peer 1 is going to have to bring the generator down to replace the fuel filter, something that is easily avoided with a little pre-planning.

Finally, while there were many reports of data center operations teams sleeping in the facility over the duration of the storm, in most cases it appears those teams were locally based.  To me, this is a huge operational no-no, and one that could definitely impact customers.  Let me explain.

In a former life, I was the Director of Operations and Engineering for multiple free-standing data centers with around 50,000 sq/ft of usable space in Charlotte, NC.  The company I worked for grew from three facilities in three markets to 19 facilities in 10 markets over my 6 years there, with three of those markets being in Florida.  Hurricane and storm planning was a very real part of our day-to-day processes.  Early on, we identified that we needed to standardize both the equipment and processes as much as possible from facility to facility so that were weren’t dependent on the local teams to be able to run things efficiently, especially in the Florida markets.  Why?  Because we didn’t want the local staff working in the data center during a disaster.

One of the primary things I learned from running the data centers, was that I never wanted to put an operations engineer in a position where he had to pick between his job and his family.  Working in a critical facility role is inherently stressful all by itself; everything in the data center can be life-threatening.  The best facilities engineers are the ones who are completely focused on the job at hand.  In the case of a huge disaster like Sandy, every one of those engineers have friends and family who were also affected by the storm.  How can they focus on the complex problems at the facility when they have kids at home with no power, or family with flooding and downed trees?  They can’t, and it’s not fair to ask them to.

One of the plans we put in place (but thankfully never had to implement) at my time running data centers was that each facility had 3-5 designated engineers who were part of a disaster response team (DRT).  If a significant event was forecast for a market that were had a data center in, we’d fly a team in 2-3 days early.  Then the local market team would do a full handoff to the DRT, making sure that everyone was on the same page.  Once that hand off was complete, we only asked one thing of the local team: go home and take care of your family.  They knew the data center was in good hands, and we let them focus on the things that the company couldn’t.  The ultimate winner there was the customer, who had a fully prepped, rested and non-distracted facilities team on-site with nothing else to focus on but making sure their equipment stayed powered and connected.

Maybe it just hasn’t gotten any press, but why wouldn’t Peer 1, Internap, Equinix  have a plan like this in place?  They have 19 data centers worldwide and had a week’s notice to prepare, why didn’t they have additional staffing on-site?  Why were customers carrying fuel?  What happens if one of them slipped on the stairs and got hurt?  I’m glad these customers were able to keep the lights on despite their provider, but this certainly isn’t an optimal resolution.

In the end, it’s all still about people.  Whether it’s on the software side or the facilities end, it’s still people who built, test, operate and support the “clouds” that our workloads call home.  When one of those steps fails, the cascading effects typically become visible right away, with far-reaching consequences.

Secondly, it’s fantastic that Cisco was the one to pull the trigger here.  Cloupia has long led the way in UCS orchestration, and since they interoperate with most of the existing Cisco partner ecosystem already, it was a natural fit.  It also provides a fully integrated management, orchestration and service delivery platform that can have complete visibility and functionality across storage, network and compute, something that will serve Cisco well as their portfolio and partnerships expand.  I get the sense that this was exactly where Cloupia wanted to end up, as rumor has it that Cisco wasn’t the first company to express an interest in the privately held firm.

Finally, it provides customers with another quality option to look at when deciding which UI they want to choose to manage their infrastructure.  In this regard, I’m of the opinion that the more choices the customer have, the better.  Each enterprise has different requirements, different legacy artifacts to manage, different staffing levels and abilities and different cost models to work with.  More choices means that there is a higher likelihood that the customer will get a product that is closer to what they want.

From a VCE standpoint, this is where being a joint venture with Cisco, EMC and VMware really rocks.  We’ve known the Cloupia guys for a while, just like we knew the DynamicOps team before they got acquired by VMware.  Now, we’ll get to have complete internal access and input into the future direction of the product, and we’ll get to help shape it into something that’s not just excellent at supporting Vblocks, but converged infrastructure of all shapes.

Today, I’d argue that VCE provides the industry’s most comprehensive set of validated options when it comes to converged operations and service delivery.  Here’s a quick list off the top of my head:

• EMC UIM
• EMC Watch4Net
• EMC Ionix
• Cisco CIAC
• Cisco Cloupia
• VMware vCenter
• VMware vCenter Operations
• VMware Automation Center
• VMware vCloud Director
• CA Capacity Management and Reporting Suite for Vblock™ Platforms
• CA Private Cloud Accelerator for Vblock™ Platforms
• CA Process Automation for Vblock™ Platforms
• CA Virtual Desktop Automation for Vblock™ Platforms
• BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management
• BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management Suite
• Afore CloudLink
• Apptio
• HyTrust
• Infoblox Grid™
• LogRhythm
• Nimsoft
• ScienceLogic
• VMTurbo Operations Manager
• Xangati

Note that the many of these aren’t just partners of VCE, they are products owned by our investor companies.  The opportunity to sell, tightly integrate and seamlessly support these tools is far greater for VCE based on where we sit than it is for other companies, regardless of partnership status.

It’s quickly becoming obvious that converged operation and service delivery has become a core part of the value proposition for converged infrastructure.  Companies like VCE, Dell (Gale Technologies), HP (OpsWare) and IBM continue to make acquisitions and investments in this area, and the bar is continually being raised.  For the companies who look at converged infrastructure as a marketing program and not something worth investing development or acquisition dollars in (I’m looking at you, NetApps), the road is going to get longer and steeper.  The same goes for the hyper-converged infrastructure players.  They are scrapping hard to get out of the SMB and VDI environments, but if they don’t offer interoperability with enterprise-class tools, and maybe show a little differentiation along the way, they aren’t going to be in the conversation long.  A vCenter plugin is a good start, but that alone is not enterprise management.

Even then, most companies are still building a management strategy and portfolio around the manual discovery of the individual hardware elements.  In their desire to be everything to everyone, they haven’t changed the fundamentals of the issue.  Either nothing has awareness of the other components that are involved in supporting workloads, as in the case of FlexPod, PureSystems and CloudSystem, or everything is forced through an abstracted software layer meant to emulate separate hardware stacks where none exist. Either way, that means that the customers have to spend time and money in an effort to build intelligence themselves using the tools they have chosen.  The next frontier is going to be won by vendors who can build in this sense of context out of the box, and if you are a vendor offering a reference architecture and passing it off as “converged infrastructure” you are going to quickly discover how difficult providing context can be in a world of infinite variable.  Good luck!

For me, it made me think about how Cisco has colored and driven the success we’ve had at VCE.  Make no mistake, there is was very deliberate process of DNA infusion from all of the investor companies, one that continues to this day.  If you think the selection of VCE executives and decision-makers isn’t done with a plan, you aren’t paying attention.

So, in the spirit of Chuck’s premise, let’s look at the things that Cisco brings to the table that drives the personality, behavior and success of VCE.  What DNA did we inherit?  How is it different than what EMC brings to the table?  How is it unique to the organism that is VCE?

To start at the beginning, I think it’s important to remember how audacious the concept of VCE (Acadia) was in it’s inception.  Has there ever been a company quite like it, formed by technology giants, as equals, spanning wildly divergent technology stacks in such a fundamental way?  I can’t think of one, but some of you who have been around longer than I may want to weight in below in the comments.  I know it hasn’t happened in my professional lifetime, and that along makes it worth examining.  I bet, in 10 years, there will be a whole raft of MBA classes examining how it was conceived, and the market forces that drove both the forming, the pivot (Acadia –> VCE) and the success of the company.

Part of the reason the idea was so unlikely, is because Cisco and EMC are very different companies, in many fundamental ways.  Besides just the East Coast/West Coast divide, there were fundamental differences that needed to be addressed.  The previous partnerships that Chuck referred to certainly paved the road, but it’s far to say that there was a significant amount of adjustment necessary in the early days of Acadia.  In addition to using a very new product in the UCS server line, two very different cultures were sitting at the same table for the first time in any real tactical sense.  Not everyone was able to make the transition that was necessary; not everyone has to this day.  But I think it’s fair to say that both companies brought a lot to share with each other.  It was also a very real risk for both companies, because failure wasn’t going to go unnoticed.

The first thing that I think Cisco gave to VCE was a respect for a disciplined product development process.  The flow by which new product ideas are funneled into the company and are vetted, tested and implemented is very much a Cisco thing.  How we do parent company roadmap roll-ups and then turn that into the Vblock Interoperability Matrix is very much a Cisco personality-driven process, and it’s become one of the core, fundamental differentiators that VCE maintains in the market to this day.

Secondly, I think the sales process that VCE uses itself, particularly the role of the vArchitect, is heavily influenced by Cisco.  It’s fair to say that we have a very, very engineer driven sales engagement process, which is very different from the EMC way of things.  Cisco showed us how you can win the technology battle at the tactical level with great engineers, and then use a high-quality sales team to handle the upstream positioning.  The vArchitects at VCE are a unique group across the board, and the amount of technical knowledge they need to have across all three technology stacks is definitely in the Cisco tradition.  In fact, a number of the new Cisco data center engineers I’ve met on the pre-sales side look to be cut from the same cloth.  Having those kind of people in front of customers is a huge benefit to all involved.

Next, I think we have inherited much of the strategic ethos of Cisco, especially at the executive level, a process that continues up through the recent naming of long-time Cisco executive Praveen Akkiraju as our CEO.  Especially in the enterprise and large service provider spaces, there are few companies that have done as well for as long as Cisco, and Praveen brings that mindset to his new job in spades.  He has very, very quickly put his stamp on parts of the company, and I’m excited to see some of the changes in philosophy that he has championed come to fruition.

Finally, and this is more of a personal observation based on my involvement, but VCE has learned a ton from the Cisco event marketing team.  Having been part of most of the events that we did over the last two years, I always admired the scope of activities that Cisco brought to their events, whether it was Cisco Live or events run by their partners like EMC World and VMworld.  There are things, like the layout of the booth and the demo/theater setup that were originally modeled very much after EMC, and even those have drifted towards Cisco.  In the future, I bet you’ll see more and more joint marketing work done at these kinds of events.  In particular, Cisco has been spectacular at the community side of their events. Whether it’s video updates, roving reporters, “Engineers Unplugged” whiteboard sessions or use of social media, Cisco is a standard that VCE will continue to work towards.

Of course, all of this is on the “soft” side of the house.  On the hardware side, things have worked out as well as could have been hoped.  There’s a rumor that EMC attempted to kick-start a Vblock-like product prior to the introduction of the UCS platform, and wow did they dodge a bullet there.  The programmability and stateless nature of the entire platform has become such a core part of what the Vblock is that I can’t imagine having another server technology in there.  The MDS switches, the migration of fabric services into the Nexus 5000-series switches, the simplicity and power of the Fabric Interconnect concept; these are all things that have become industry high-watermarks and have been the bedrock of our success.  Remember, the UCS was the “questionable” part of the Vblock when it was released.  We fought arm in arm with our Cisco brothers and sisters to show the traditional Dell/HP/IBM server huggers that there was a better way of doing things, and slowly but surely we’ve turned the discussion around.  How many features in the Gen8 ProLiant servers are direct results of the new world-view that Cisco brought to the space?

In my opinion, VCE is lightning in a bottle; there will never be another company like this.  The executives from all of the investor companies that were involved in its creation deserve a lot of credit, both for their achievement, but also for the sheer testicular fortitude that was involved in making the decision to bring it to life.  We got many things from the parent companies, not all of them welcome, but all of them necessary.  Out of this petri dish has come a list of things that have made both companies better.  A product that customers respond to at a very fundamental level, sure, but more than that we see that the DNA from the parent companies can be very complimentary to one another.  Despite initial concerns about their differences, it’s the combination of their individual DNA that has made VCE the success that it is today.

I can’t wait to see what happens next.

One of the things that VCE has been quietly working on for some time in conjunction with our partners, investors and customers, is the idea of how to extend the value of a converged infrastructure into the operations and management space in a more fundamental and organic way.  If you look at the Vblock as an example, how can we take the manufacturing and implementation discipline we apply to the systems and allow it to be leveraged by customers who are looking to drive efficiency into their operational processes as well?

To start this process, we took a long look at the systems management lifecycle that our customers use.  We wanted to see how converged systems were being used in the real world, and figure out what the challenges were that needed to be addressed.  Interestingly, we discovered that there were actually three separate processes that needed to be accounted for!

When you think through it, from an enterprise standpoint, you can map each of these lifecycles to a group within existing IT teams.  The Pre-Day 0 team is the “facilities” group.  They take boxes, and turn them into raw capacity.  This includes rack and stack, cabling, power and space provisioning, maybe hardware/bios level software deployment and firmware leveling.  In general, this lifecycle has a beginning and end only once for each infrastructure stack that is deployed.  An enterprise may deploy multiple stacks, and go through this process multiple times, but in general it’s a 1:1 mapping with the deployment of an infrastructure.

The second lifecycle is run by the “infrastructure” team, and this is where they take raw capacity and turn it into capacity that is usable by the business.  While there is only one Pre-Day 0 lifecycle, the Day process may run dozens or hundreds of time.  This process gets invoked anytime new capacity is added into the stack, be it network, compute or storage.  The “provisioning” process here involved adding new blades into existing VMware vSphere clusters or creating new ones, identifying and presenting new storage objects, or resizing existing ones and creating new network constructs or delivering new networks into the infrastructure.

Finally, there is a third lifecycle that happens once the raw capacity is turned into usable capacity.  In addition to being the most costly part of the process from a staffing and tooling perspective, this is also where traditional hardware vendors take a big step back and lets the customer engage with a legacy ITSM ecosystem.  It’s not really a failing on the part of the hardware vendors, it’s a matter of tooling.  The tools that each vendor puts out is designed with a very limited scope, because they only need to support their particular product domain.  DCNM is a fantastic tool that Cisco provides to manage networks and storage fabrics, but it will never provision storage or hypervisors.  Unisphere is a great storage management tool from EMC, but it will never assign UCS profiles to blades.  Knowing this, and knowing that the number of variables that could be present within a customer’s data center, the hardware vendors push the responsibility of creating an “infrastructure object” that is comprised of all of the individual components that are deployed and consumed together back to the customer.

The answer here, is not to build a better tool.  It’s to enable our customers to consume and manage Vblock Systems in a way that provides logical unification of the components that are being used along with context and functionality that translates directly into operational simplicity, efficiency and savings by customers.  This enablement needs to be ubiquitous and integrated directly into the platform, and needs to be consumable by every ITSM product out there, from highly flexible and advanced tools like Cisco’s Intelligent Automation for Cloud stack and VMware’s vCenter to the most basic SNMP-aware offerings on the market.  Overwhelmingly, customers want programmable and extensible interfaces for these types of functionality, and anything that doesn’t have an open, documented API just isn’t prepared to play in this space.

As a demonstration of the possibilities that this kind of management model could offer, VCE will be showing demonstrations of multiple implementations, including with VMware vCenter and the Cisco CIAC stack.  Both are live and running in the VCE booth, and both are examples of how an implementation could look.  It’s very, very important to note, however, that the power of an open API is that the possibilities are endless as to who could implement a solution using it, and what those solutions can enable customers to do.  Could we see an implementation that specifically targets the management and operations needs of particular vertical markets, like service providers or healthcare?  Absolutely.  Could we see implementations that are focused around tight application managements for appliance-like Vblock Systems?  Of course.  Could we see implementations that map current API stacks, like those from AWS and OpenStack into a private or public cloud run on a Vblock System?  There’s no reason we couldn’t.

This idea, of unifying a multi-vendor, converged, productized infrastructure in order to streamline operations for customers is something that we are very excited about.  The core principal that allows us to take this step, is that our core standardization on the designs and components included in the Vblock Systems means that we have a known set of variables to work with, allowing us to provide deep and broad coverage for how those variables are put together.  When you don’t have that same level of standardization the number of variables increases exponentially making any kind of platform unification difficult.  It’s not the failing of a particular company or vendor, it’s a basic truth of tool development when you don’t have any control over the things the tool needs to manage.  At our core, VCE took a different path, and this is one of the many, many ways that choice ultimately pays off for our customers.

• VMware acquires Nicira, the next step in cloud solutions: Nicira could be used to support multiple hypervisors
• VMware’s Acquisition of Nicira – VMware confirming the hypervisor is dead: Nicira could be used to support multiple hypervisors
• VMware’s Big Shot at Cisco: A coup — one that could pose a major threat to Cisco’s efforts to expand into the virtualization-technology market
• With Nicira buy, VMware claims cloud freedom of choice: Substantial embrace of non-VMware hypervisors and clouds
• Nicira Acquisition Is VMware’s Smartest Move Yet: the technology that will lead VMware into sustained profitability and relevance in the enterprise and the cloud
• Some Thoughts on VMware’s Strategic Acquisition of Nicira: VMware’s acquisition of Nicira adds to the fear and loathing
• How VMware Embraced Its Open Source Nemesis: The virtualization giant is also shifting even further into the world of open source software
• VMware Pays $1.26B for the Future of Networking: The age of Cisco is on the wane, giving way to the age of Nicira. And VMware.
• Cisco Touts Its Cloudy Open Future – Will VMware Do The Same?: Questions about VMware’s openness

Twitter was equally bombastic, and quite a bit more humorous.  Here’s some of the ones that I can share, but trust me, my DM list looks like open mic night at the Improv…

• Joshua McKenty ‏@jmckenty: For only $1.26B, VMware joins #OpenStack (by buying Nicira, and the PTL of Quantum). A gold sponsorship would have been 0.0000397 of that. (one of my personal favorites!)
• Brad Casemore @BradCasemore: Now that VMware has acquired Nicira, the EMC-Cisco divorce could be imminent.
• Rohit Sharma‏ @rohit_x_: Nicira acquisition a sign of VMware’s vulnerability and weakness, not strength of Nicira’s technology/products.
• Florian Otel‏ @FlorianOtel: That odd sound you hear ? It’s N1kV crying his eyes out #VMware #Nicira
• Alessandro Perilli‏ @a_perilli: DynamicOps first, now Nicira. VMware is preparing to go big on multi-hypervisor management. The time has come.
• Joe Onisick‏ @jonisick: Yep #VMware intends to acquire #Nicira. Now they’ll be competing full on with #Cisco
• Damon McKay‏ @DMcKay: VMware acquisition of Nicira.. that awkward moment when the wife (Cisco) finds the babysitter sitting at the breakfast table. What next VCE?

This acquisition and some of the conversations are naturally of interest to me, since I work for a company owned by Cisco, VMware and EMC.  Any time new technology is brought into the family, or new tensions, it’s something that will affect us individually and collectively.  That said, I’m just a worker-bee, and I don’t have any insight into the machinations that went on behind the scenes.  Let me say that again: I don’t have any more insight into this acquisition and it’s impact than anyone else who works in the industry.

That being said, I don’t get it. I understand what Nicira does.  I understand the threat that such a company could provide to Cisco, especially in a situation where the hardware switch business that Cisco counts on could be impacted.  I understand the efforts Cisco is making around programmability (SDN, in Cisco-speak) and how much of that was in response to advances made by companies like Nicira, Big Switch and Embrane.  I understand the existing overlap in the VMware and Cisco product sets, and the tension created when VMware went deep into the virtualized switching and security spaces (DvS vs. N1000v, vShield Edge, vShield App vs. VSG), and then tightly integrated those products into vCloud Director.  I understand how important the Nexus 1000V is to the architecture that Cisco envisions as they virtualize more of their security and content management products, and how VMware’s advancing of features in their included Distributed vSwitch threatens that virtualization process.  I understand that Cisco attempted to buy Nicira and was rebuffed, and having VMware end up with the prize is a blow to Cisco’s ego and contributes to the perception that Cisco isn’t a place where start-ups want to land.  I understand all that.

What I don’t get, is how it’s a strategic problem for Cisco.  On the contrary, I would think that Cisco would be ecstatic that the technology ended up with VMware.  Why?  Here’s my two primary reasons:

1. VMware, especially in the short term, has a very different need from the Nicira product than Cisco was originally worried about.  VMware is not going to be an x86-based switch provider, they are going to continue to be a hypervisor provider and virtualized infrastructure (software defined data center?) management company.
2. VMware is not going to recognize revenue tomorrow that Cisco is recognizing today.  The gradual erosion of the top-of-rack switch market is a process that has been going on for years.  This acquisition isn’t going to change that, or accelerate it.  If anything it’s going to slow it down, because it pulls a prominent and open-source friendly SDN player off the market at a time when growth is rapid.

So what could VMware do with Nicira?  I bet they could use it to help with the extensibility and functionality of the existing vSphere networking stack.  I bet they could use it to help build some of the multi-site networking features required for stretched and metro clusters directly into the hypervisor, driving down the cost and complexity of those designs just as they are starting to become more popular.  I bet they could use it to create a virtualized network control plane to better help manage traffic paths between different elements within the stack.

From Cisco’s point of view, aren’t there a dozen WORSE places for Nicira to have ended up?  Wouldn’t it have been worse if a direct competitor like Juniper or Palo Alto or Fortinet or someone who actually competes at a 1:1 product level with Cisco had been involved?  Wouldn’t it have been worse if IBM or Dell were able to start driving switching into generic appliances?  I feel like it would.  I feel like Cisco would be bunkered down trying to figure out when the sky was going to fall, and the market would have started selling off in droves.

VMware and Cisco compete directly in many places even outside of the pure network space, particularly around the orchestration and service catalog piece.  This isn’t something that’s unique to the VMware/Cisco relationship, it happens all the time between large enterprises with strategic alliances.  Hell, Cisco and EMC own my company, and the Cisco/NetApp relationship is still alive and kicking, and EMC/Brocade is as strong as ever.  This is how companies work.  I hate the word “coopetition”, but there you go.

It does seem like there’s a LOT of invested effort put into playing up any and all difficulties between VMware, EMC and Cisco.  I guess that’s what happens when you sit at the top of the hill; everyone takes pot-shots.  What I know from personal experience is that our Chairman and CEO came from Cisco, our president and VP of Sales came from EMC and the level of talent all up and down the org chart that came from the parent companies is impressive.  I know that every formal statement made by anyone involved, be it John Chambers, Joe Tucci, Paul Maritz, Rob Lloyd or others has been overwhelmingly positive.  I know that the numbers every quarter are orders of magnitude improvements YoY.  I know the percentage of global Cisco data center revenue that VCE contributed.  The shadows that are being jumped at don’t exist, in my experience.

In its own special place of honor down here, I wanted to call out possibly the most poorly referenced and asinine of all the articles written in response to the Nicira deal, Barb Darrow’s tour-de-force of ad revenue-generating slapstick, “Vblocks – here today, where tomorrow?” over on GigaOm.com. Whether you like the conclusions drawn by the posts I referenced above, you can (usually, kinda) see the logic that was used to arrive there. Not so with this one. With a headline that would impress even the Register, Barb dives into a litany of unsupported conjecture and unconnected quotes. Let’s look at my favorites:

Now that VMware has bought Nicira and its software-defined networking expertise, doubts about the future of the VCE Vblock effort have multiplied.

No where in the article are those doubts listed, or is proof of their multiplication shown, but it does make for a good opening line, doesn’t it?

What’s new is that with Nicira in the fold, VMware gets more directly competitive with Cisco, further stressing the partnership.

I’d love to see the reasoning behind this statement. As I pointed out above, there are dozens of people who COULD have bought Nicira that would have been a much, much more direct threat to Cisco.  Even if Cisco does look at VMware differently now, how does that affect the partnership?  Cisco partners with EMC and NetApp directly on competitive offerings, and that hasn’t stopped Cisco from investing resources into VCE, but this will?  Also, with VMware having a very small investment in VCE compared to Cisco and EMC, is the implication that Cisco will forsake a proven, growing sales channel for their fastest growing product over something like this?  How about we all use our brains for a second, OK?

“I think [the VMware-Nicera deal] is the last nail in VCE’s coffin,” said Vanessa Alvarez, president of Alvarez Consulting.

I’d like for Ms. Alvarez to a) contribute more than 10 words to the topic, b) please enumerate the previous nails that didn’t happen to be the last of them and c) get the author to spell Nicira correctly.  Again, it’s great copy and I’m sure will be great advertising for her personal consulting group, but it’s meaningless.  Not only does Ms. Alvarez not get the chance to explain any part of her comment, the rest of the article doesn’t expound on the existence of those nails either.  Maybe Ms. Alvarez had some great insight, but the author certainly didn’t bother sharing it.

Even VCE reseller partners once jazzed about selling Vblocks are dropping or reconsidering the product. Their question: Why devote time and resources to something that even the parent companies seem to be forsaking?

“I feel both Cisco and EMC are hedging their bets with their own individual solutions and they will continue to support VCE when the customer truly wants a converged infrastructure solution and they are competing against an IBM, HP or Oracle all in one solution,” said Jack Kaiser, SVP of sales for Focus Technology Solutions, a Seabrook, N.H. tech reseller. Companies like Focus that partner with all three VCE founders, have to figure out what’s best for the customer, he said.

This is one of my favorite sections.  Let’s count the issues:

1. The opening paragraph references VCE reseller partners that are dropping or reconsidering selling Vblocks, and then a quote is given from a small VAR based in New England that employs less than 50 people and who has never been a VCE reseller (that I can find).
2. The quote from the VAR shows an obvious lack of understanding for what a Vblock is and how customers are adopting it.  The goal isn’t to be able to compete with other converged solutions (a market VCE pioneered, by the way), it’s to show customers how a manufactured, converged infrastructure can make IT easier than putting the pieces together yourself and allow them to focus on the applications and the business.
3. Yes, it’s true that companies like Focus have to figure out what’s best for their customers.  That is, in fact, their entire reason for existence.  I think Matt Davis summed it up best here.  Bleeding hearts, indeed.

Some see the appointment of EMC’s Pat Gelsinger as CEO of VMware as a move by EMC CEO Joe Tucci to tighten his hold on VMware. (EMC owns an 80 percent stake in the virtualization leader.) It’s clear to them that EMC with VMware and now Nicira is on a collision course with Cisco that leaves VCE and Vblock vulnerable.

Some?  Who is some?  Are we still talking about VARs?  Are we talking about analysts?  Once more, something is pointed out as “clear” with absolutely no supporting content.  Please, if it’s so clear, include some of the rationale in your article! I would LOVE for someone, Ms. Darrow included, to explain to me how VMware is on a collision course with Cisco in any way that implicates the movement of significant revenue.  It’s been days now, and the most anyone can do is “could, would, should, might, maybe” but no one has actually drawn a straight line from the Nicira acquisition to this “collision” being discussed.

Whether that growth proves meets expectations and is enough to sustain multiple converged infrastructure bundles when more work is flowing to webscale data centers running commodity hardware, remains a very big question.

Finally, we have the denouement.  After two quick paragraphs that include quotes from VCE that were given to other people for other purposes, she throws in two final jabs: is the demonstrated growth enough to meet expectations (whose expectations we are left to figure out on our own) and can it survive with workloads moving to “webscale” data centers running commodity hardware.  There was obviously no research into the service providers who have chosen Vblock (or any other reference architecture, for that matter) over commodity hardware.  There was certainly no data or references to back up the assertions.  It was just thrown out there like the smelly, rotting fish it was, to dry in the sun.

This isn’t news.  This is hardly commentary.  There was no effort, it appears, to reach out to VCE for comment or information.  With the lone exception that a VCE employee took the picture used in the story (which he had to point out in the comments), there doesn’t appear to have been any input provided by anyone associated with the company either directly or from the partner ranks.  As a summation of the general reaction to the article from inside my team: we thought GigaOm was better than this.  Today’s story about the Oracle acquisition of Xsigo being about SDN and then Barb’s mea culpa after commenters set the record straight certainly hasn’t changed anyone’s minds…

John Furrier said it best when he commented on Twitter “as enterprise tech gets more consumer like it will put pressure on reporters to actually know their shit & still report.” I don’t want to pick just on Barb and GigaOm, because there are so many “news” outlets that are doing the same that it has to seem like the normal way of things.  As a consumer, I can tell you it’s not.  If you want to provide analysis, you need to have more than a press release and Google.  You need to know the players, you need to know the nuances and you need to understand the relationships (public and private) to the point where you can not only see the dominos, you can tell which way they are leaning.  Short of that, you are just making noise and hurting everyone in the process.

In the six years I worked at Peak 10, from Ops and Engineering Director for the Charlotte data centers to Director of Managed Services, we certainly saw our share of issues.  Some of them were operational in nature, as we learned to scale and to adapt to data centers with different gear and requirements.  Some were engineering issues with equipment or configurations.  I’ve seen UPS systems and generators catch on fire, witnessed improper grounding installation, breaker failures, personnel and planning issues.  When you have something that is very complex and grows incredibly fast, as both the company and the data centers were, and things happen.

We certainly won more than we lost over that six year period, and the availability of our services, cloud and facility alike, certainly rivaled the best in the industry.  We weren’t alone in our successes or our failures, either.  The industry in general saw incredible growth, with data center companies like Digital Realty Trust, Terremark, 365 Main, Switch & Data, Savvis, Hosting.com, Hosted Solutions and many, many others buying or being bought as the smaller players consolidated.  Investment groups like ABRY Partners and Welsh Carson and others led the charge in seeking out these high growth companies and making the necessary investments in them.  In 2011 alone, there was over $12 billion in M&A activity in the data center sector.

It is, however, noteworthy that not every acquisition that I listed above was precipitated by strong numbers and strong performance.  Some acquisitions happen when a company with good facilities realizes that the building alone isn’t enough to keep customers happy.  Without an operational acumen and discipline to match, even the best of data centers will go off-line.  The 365 Main disaster from 2007 is a representative example, where a facility built to survive anything, didn’t survive a simple power outage. No one was surprised when they were eventually bought by DRT.

So, all this brings us back to the AWS outages in Northern Virginia last week.  Looking at the official Amazon summary, there were both facility and software failures involved, an especially painful fact considering how AWS positions the software as the way to remain resilient even when the facility fails.  I’m not an expert on the AWS software side, so I’ll leave it to others better qualified to comment on how/why the software failures happened.

But on the facilities front, it’s hard to see how the month of June was anything short of a disaster for Amazon on the data center operations side.  Data Center Knowledge has, as always, a fantastic series of recaps and interpretations on their site. On June 14th, an extended outage was experienced when a defective cooling fan on a generator failed, bringing the generator off-line.  If that wasn’t bad enough, the failover of the load from the secondary to the tertiary source failed as well when a breaker was misconfigured and opened when the load transfer happened.  After the incident, Amazon conducted an audit and found another misconfigured breaker (my guess, it’s the one that handles the load transfer in the opposite direction) which was fixed.  Amazon also was quoted as saying:

“We’ve now validated that all breakers worldwide are properly configured, and are incorporating these configuration checks into our regular testing and audit processes.”

Last week, the culprit was “the repeated failure of multiple generators”, which required manual intervention.  Oops.

These outages came after a series of high-profile power outages, some in the same data center in 2010.  An “electrical ground fault and short circuit” took out power on May 8th, 2010.  A botched maintenance caused an outage on May 4th, 2010, compounded by a UPS that didn’t sense an input power failure.  Later that day, “human error” caused a generator that was support critical load to shut down.

In each case, AWS was quick to point out that users always have the ability to deploy instances across multiple availability zones, advice which didn’t exactly work as planned with the EBS issues seen last week.  They also say that the power incidents are unrelated.  I strenuously disagree with this statement, since all of them can be traced back to a lack of discipline in the operation of the data centers in question.  I think this quote proves that out perfectly:

In the meantime, Amazon said it would adjust several settings in the process that switches the electrical load to the generators, making it easier to transfer power in the event the generators start slowly or experience uneven power quality as they come online. The company will also have additional staff available to start the generators manually if needed.

• What kind of enterprise data center doesn’t have a breaker coordination study completed and on file, both at the time of commissioning and every time the load of the data center crosses a pre-set threshold?
• We never, ever did a power maintenance of any kind without notifying customers as far in advance as we could, if for no other reason than so they could have staff available just in case.  I’m not aware that Amazon provides its customer any kind of notice of maintenance.
• “Electrical ground fault and short circuit” is data center code for “poorly wired but it hadn’t bitten us yet.”
• When a human being has access to a generator that is supporting critical load and is able to bring that generator off-line accidentally, you have an operational problem.

When generators and switch gear that was installed and commissioned less than 18 months earlier fails spectacularly, and when the resolution is to start generators manually and adjust the ATS failover process, you have an operational issue.  My guess is that the “full load test” that Amazon discusses in their summary was done under controlled conditions, not by cutting input power to the UPS and letting the ATS move the load. If you don’t test under the conditions you expect to see when there’s an actual emergency, that’s not a full load test.  Sure, manually opening up input breakers has risks as well, but that’s what you are expecting to happen when the power goes out, right?  Awfully nice of Amazon to throw the gear under the bus, and then immediately follow that up with this quote:

Therefore, prior to completing the engineering work mentioned above, we will lengthen the amount of time the electrical switching equipment gives the generators to reach stable power before the switch board assesses whether the generators are ready to accept the full power load. Additionally, we will expand the power quality tolerances allowed when evaluating whether to switch the load to generator power. We will expand the size of the onsite 24×7 engineering staff to ensure that if there is a repeat event, the switch to generator will be completed manually (if necessary) before UPSs discharge and there is any customer impact.

So was this an equipment issue or an operational issue?  If it’s equipment-related, why are you changing ATS parameters?  My guess is that the original parameters were set and tested under a specific load, and as the draw of the data center increased the settings were never adjusted.  Generators, UPS systems, ATS gear, distribution panels, floor PDUs, breaker settings, EVERYTHING behaves differently under load, and if you aren’t keeping the data center processes in sync with your load growth you are asking for these kinds issues.

Of course, it’s possible that the data center and the staff running them don’t belong to Amazon at all.  I know that Amazon leases a significant amount of floor space from DRT, although it doesn’t look like the case in NoVA according to this release. Even if it were, however, it would only make Amazon more culpable, not less.  It’s one thing if you own the facility and need to salvage the investment, but if you are leasing the space and stay after failures like this you have to ask why.  That being said, DRT has a pretty good track record for data center operations, and I’d be very surprised if this was a DRT issue.

So what’s next for Amazon?  I wish they would just ditch the US East-1 data center that keeps giving them problems.  Of course the vast, vast majority of AWS instances are located there, so that may involve acquiring more floor space.  Whatever the costs, it can’t be as expensive as having large customers move away from the service in part because of the availability of the data center.  It can’t be more expensive than the miserable PR that they have received (including all their competitors piling on in ways large and small).  Sometimes you have to burn the data center to save your reputation.

Bigger picture, this complexity is the reason that companies who need uptime continue to find outsourcing partners.  It’s understandable that most of the people in the industry are infatuated by IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, but remember that none of those services are worth a damn if the data center has no power.  Do everyone a favor and go find someone who is excellent at keeping the lights on!

CoSentry started as a colocation company back in 2000.  They opened their first data center in 2001 and don’t seem to have slowed down since.  Starting with BC/DR services, they have steadily added to their core portfolio to the point where they have a great set of offerings today, from security to managed services, virtual servers and infrastructure consolidation offerings.  Without having any hard evidence about their customer mix, I’m willing to bet that enterprises LOVE the multiple, high quality data centers, and the mid-tier and SMB customers like using CoSentry as a complete IT outsourcer, letting them handle all of the IT functions while they focus on their businesses.

I can feel pretty comfortable in that assessment because, you see, I’ve watched this show before!  Over my 6 year tenure at Peak 10 I saw the same transformation, from data center, to managed services to infrastructure/cloud services.  I saw Managed Services skyrocket from ~4% of their total revenue to close to 30% when I left.  It took time, but customers figured it out and it was up to Peak 10 to adapt and accommodate.

Peak 10 and CoSentry certainly aren’t the only ones playing that game.  ViaWest and Windstream Hosted Solutions are both examples of companies that have evolved with the times and who now offer impressive portfolios of services to customers, as are Terremark and to some extent companies like Sungard.  All are examples of companies that started at one side of the spectrum and followed the customers (and their money) to the other side, and all are successful companies who have been (or will be) acquisition targets.

On the other side, we have companies like Varrow, another local Charlotte company and an award-winning VAR for EMC, Cisco and others.  Varrow had a similar problem, but in the other direction.  As a fantastic reseller and integrator, they were running into customers who didn’t have capital dollars free, but who could spend op-ex.  They also had a brand and a trusted advisor relationship with their customers that could be leveraged, so they branched out into Managed Services as well.  Varrow is a group I know well, but I bet there are lots and lots of former VARs out there looking to expand into services, both to generate additional revenue, but also to create a monthly recurring revenue stream to smooth out the ups and downs that hardware sales can bring.  Definitely a smart move, in my opinion, as long as you have the ability to back up your services with the right people, which Varrow certainly does.

With all of that in mind, where are the data center providers that also are VARs?  From my research, CoSentry isn’t a VAR, although they can do the integration even on complex systems like the Vblock.  Varrow doesn’t build or operate data centers, although they do lease space in one.  Is that were the logical conclusion of this trend leads?  On one hand, the investment model in data center space is easily modeled and predicted.  The capital investment needed is typically the barrier to entry there.  The VAR model is much, much more dependent on people and certifications, while managed services sits in the middle, requiring good people with good operational discipline.  Does it make sense for a company to be able to own the transaction cycle with a customer from purchase to colocation to service?  Maybe.  What do you think?

Also, a special thank you to the Cisco Live social media team for their efforts.  Omar Sultan (@omarsultan) and Amy Lewis (@CommsNinja) got more out of the resources they had than most of us thought possible.  From the Social Media Lounge to the influence tracking, to the roving reporters (Fred Nix and Josh Atwell were great!) to the keynote coverage to the impromptu birthday celebrations to the countless introductions, they were awesome.  Thank you so much to both of you and everyone who supported your efforts!

Any wrap up of the event should start by pointing out the obvious difference in tone of this Cisco Live versus last year’s.  Honestly, to me, the keynotes last year were borderline depressing.  With some of the struggles Cisco was in the middle of, the layoffs/retirements, some product misses, it might even have been understandable, but it definitely left a pall over the event.  Even William Shatner couldn’t close the show on a high note.

This year it was a completely different story.  The Cisco event keynotes are always well produced affairs, and everyone from John Chambers down is very, very good a the public speaking part of the job.  The message this year was one of growth in key areas and a focus on programmability that probably frustrated as many people in the industry as it made happy.  Personally, I think Cisco’s angle on SDN and their now apparent strategy for embracing the things they can and that their customers can consume easily while staying on course with the overall company direction is both pragmatic and understandable.  There’s going to be a loud contingent that wished they did more to jump into the full-on SDN fray, but anyone who looks at where Cisco revenues are being generated from knew that was a stretch.  It seems to me that they did enough to keep the idea of SDN from being “anti-Cisco” without causing too much turmoil.  Big ships take a long time to turn, and Cisco did well to come this far.

I was surprised there weren’t more actual product announcements.  Everyone knows that EMC and Cisco are very different from a personality standpoint, and their respective events definitely highlight some of those differences.  Where as EMC has a much more informal keynote style (both Joe Tucci and Pat Gelsinger are very “folksy” in their presentation style, in my opinion…) and likes to officially announce dozens of products and refreshes at EMC World, Cisco is more understated.  Padmasree Warrior and John Chambers are fantastic public speakers, always very smooth, rarely ad-libbing, never getting too excited, and the rest of the show follows suit.  They are certainly different events, despite both companies being diversified into vast swaths of technology, but both are great.

Cisco also isn’t afraid to go deep with the technical sessions.  There were a couple I sat in that seriously made my head hurt, and they made no apologies for presenting expert-level material.  Rick Shearer (@rick_vmwaretips) and I had a conversation about how we wished there was an expert level track of this kind at VMworld.  I bet there there are a bunch of people who would prefer to sit through deep-dive sessions that may be a little over their heads rather than the standard sessions presented by technical marketing teams.  Hopefully this is something that we’ll see evolve over the next few years.

One thing that was brought up during the conference (I think it was Chris Hoff (@Beaker) who first asked the question) was where the ASA1000v went.  Last year, especially with the release of vSphere5 by VMware, Cisco was everywhere talking about it with partners and customers.  This year, I think I saw mention of it twice, both in slide presentations, and couldn’t find anyone with a demo on the solutions floor.  As someone who lives in the “Triangle of Love™” between Cisco, VMware and EMC, I’ve got a keen interest in seeing how some of the conflicts around CIAC/vCloud Director, Nexus 1000v/VMware DvS and vShield Edge/ASA100v resolve themselves.  Best case, in my mind, would be for both sides to make their offerings modular to the point where the customer could choose which solution to implement rather than having the choice of portal/service catalog/orchestration tools be constrained by something that is really out of path, like the virtual switch and firewall being used.  Hopefully we’ll see more by the time VMworld rolls around because I get questions about this from customers every day.

After the conference ended, I stayed in SoCal through the weekend and took the family to Legoland and Disneyland.  It’s always special when the kids can come with me on a business trip, and it made a great Cisco Live that much better.  Thank you again to everyone who helped make it special, and hopefully I’ll see some of you at VMworld at the end of summer!

I love Twitter.  I love the interaction.  I love the velocity.  I love the back-and-forth.  I love trying to construct coherent thoughts with only 140 characters.  I like using it as a way to remember what, exactly, happened the night before.  I like checking into new places, I like sharing pictures.  I like trying new clients in a (seemingly) futile effort to replace my beloved Tweetdeck (old school version, please). I like how the conversation can be carried from Twitter to the blog and back, as needed.

But more than that, I love the people.  I love the personalities.  I love the attitudes and the sharing.  I love the loud and brash people, the shy people, the confident people, the timid people.  I mostly, however, like the real people.

I like real people like Colin McNamara (@colinmcnamara).  Here’s a guy I’d never met in real life, and our interaction had been 100% based on Twitter.  It was impossible not to like the guy, and I was always learning something new.  Turns out he really IS that smart, and when I needed a partner to use as a sounding board for some top-secret VCE stuff, I immediately got on a plane and flew to his offices.  Boy did I get that one right.  After sharing what we were doing, and seeing Colin start to understand where things were headed, he immediately rattled off a handful of suggestions that jumped directly into the development queue.  A few weeks later, my boss and I showed him a demo of where we were with the project, and literally, Colin started hopping up and down like a kid at Christmas.  I’m not exaggerating when I say that five minutes of his enthusiasm was enough to keep me going for weeks.  Of course the next time I saw Colin he was yelling, loudly, in front of a room full of my peers, friends and customers, that I was a Foursquare liar because he hadn’t seen me walk into a restaurant before he saw my check-in.  Which, of course, he would have been doing on Twitter too, which just tells you he’s a real person!  Now I can make fun of him because his wife wants pole dancing lessons and he doesn’t want to pay for them!

Mike Stanley (@mikestanley) is another real person.  You know how I met Mike?  Because he reached out to me on Twitter, frustrated with his VCE sales experience.  In fact, he was the first person who found me out specifically because he had been reading this blog and knew I worked for VCE.  He was the first to show me that Twitter could be a central part of how I try and reach people (so remember to blame him, OK?).  Mike was a straight shooter.  He told me where he was in his project, he told me what his preference was, and how things were going to play out.  In the end, he was right.  Our inability to get him the information he needed when he needed it, and our struggles to get him the Citrix data he needed to build a solution kept us from winning his business.  But it didn’t keep us (and me) from building a relationship with Mike that has endured.  Between building home labs and chatting about tech, I never questioned whether the guy at the other keyboard was real.  I finally got a chance to meet Mike at Cisco Live, and while it was nice to finally shake his hand, there weren’t any real “introductions” that needed to be done.  We talked about family, struggles to have kids, how awesome life was and then he took pictures of my shoes.  That’s about as real as it gets, isn’t it?  I don’t care if he’s a FlexPod customer, I care that he’s a real guy and that’s good enough for me.

While this idea of “realness” isn’t exactly a revelation, it does have consequences.  There are real people out there in Twitter-land, and your communication with them has real consequences.  For every Colin or Mike that I’ve met, there are also those who I can’t break through with; people who don’t act real to me.  Much like meeting people in person, there are just some folks you can’t reach.  I’ll keep trying though, because once you find real people Twitter becomes a whole different thing.

Context is even more important, and is impossible to get from a reference architecture.  Context is how you manage an infrastructure stack as a single object, and it’s the key ingredient in everything from operational efficiency to integration with management toolsets.  One of the ways in which context can really benefit customers is by enabling policy enforcement and compliance management and reporting at a very fundamental and foundational level, and in ways that we haven’t been able to before.

First, let’s define some terms, so we are all talking the same language.  “Policy and Compliance” are terms that get used (abused?) in many ways by many people, so to begin, here are the six different kinds of policies that our customers tell us are relevant to them, at an infrastructure level.

1. Component Compliance: At a very basic level, we’re going to define this as the set of components that I’m going to allow into my infrastructure. Maybe this is a type of storage array based on a particular feature set I require. Maybe this is a specific type of processor, or specific network switches. Maybe it’s a brand of hypervisor. In aggregate, it’s my personal definition of converged infrastructure, and it’s used to ruthlessly drive standardization. Policy here could be to validate and track all components that are added into existing platforms and all ensure new platforms only contain the technology that I’ve decided to standardize on. Wouldn’t it be neat if I could publish this policy to my vendors so that I could enforce policy on all orders as they are placed? Not in a “did you check the spreadsheet to see if this order is right” kind of way, but in a way that’s directly tied to how you order the infrastructure from your vendor or partner regardless of which piece of the platform you are ordering, and that could be tracked against?
2. Platform Compliance: This covers the standard logical and physical build of the platforms, based on tested configurations and the interoperability matrix of the components.  This includes how the physical components are racked, thermally oriented, powered and cabled.  Which version of firmware do I use on my blades, switches, HBAs?  What version of storage microcode works with the fabric interconnects I’m using?  Am I going to boot from SAN or use vSphere Auto Deploy?  Generally speaking, this defines the base set of technologies that I’m going to have at my disposal as I put together my service offerings.
3. Enterprise Platform Compliance: Here is where the planning and standardization we’ve put in place turns into the consumable infrastructure that your business uses to run workloads.  We are taking the Lego pieces we’ve defined and are finally putting them together into something that has relevance to the business.  Policy here would define how those physical components are configured for consumption: how do we apply network security models? How do we carve up and allocate storage? How do we define and consume pools of MAC, WWNN and WWPN addresses? How are physical interfaces configured and subsequently virtualized? How are hypervisors configured? How are switch and router configurations standardized and tracked? Again, wouldn’t it be neat if I could define and deploy these policies to my vendor so that at both the physical and logical layer my policies are used in the delivery and configuration of my infrastructure? I’m not talking about building to a published spec after you get the equipment or scripting an install, I’m talking about being able to track compliance against a policy that literally defines every piece of your infrastructure from the day you place an order until it’s ready to run workloads on your data center floor.
4. Regulatory Compliance: For many of you, we are finally in a space that sounds cozy and familiar!  Now that we have the infrastructure in place, we need to define policy based on outside controls that we are obligated to track against.  The added bonus would be that we could reference the hardware platform directly in these policies (if we chose to, or were required to) and integrate that compliance checking with what we do today at the application/OS/InfoSec layers.
5. Enterprise Regulatory Compliance: Of course, there’s the letter of the law, and then there’s the interpretation of the law that your company is going to choose to use.  Since both may be important depending on the situation, let’s make sure we have a way to differentiate between the two!
6. Runtime Logical Configuration Compliance: Finally, we have the workload itself.  Every application has a set of variables and requirements that are defined for it, whether that’s a particular type of blade, a specific storage tiering strategy or QoS policy, or maybe even whether it can run co-resident with other applications.  Since the platform exists to service the applications, wouldn’t it be nice if we could have a process by which we define the infrastructure provisioning by using the application requirements?

If you look at the list above, you can see that while the bottom two levels of compliance will usually be global across an enterprise, you could possibly have many Enterprise Platform Compliance policies depending on what the infrastructure is supporting.  The same could go for the higher tiers of the stack; they apply to successively smaller pieces of the overall system until we are creating them on a per-workload basis.

OK, so let’s look at an example of how all of this could work together on behalf of the customer.  Let’s look at where the rubber might meet the road…

There is a Service Provider who does business internationally, and who provides Vblock platforms for customers to leverage as a private cloud.  They have an existing, US-based customer who wants to do business in the US, and they are going to need to add a blade chassis to their existing Vblock 300 platform, along with a couple shelves of disk to support the business.  The customer has some specific compliance requirements for these workloads, including:

1. The workloads may only run in the provider’s US data centers
2. The workloads are incredibly compute-intensive, and specific CPUs are required
3. The storage requirements include extensive use of FAST Cache in front of a large amount of NL-SAS disk
4. Network latency isn’t a priority, so a lower QoS model needs to be applied
5. The data may include medical data that has personally identifiable information, so standard HIPAA controls need to be tracked.

The customer calls the SP, or submits a work ticket, and the wheels start in motion.  The SP reaches out to VCE, and using the Component Policy that’s been defined and our awareness of the platforms that have been purchased we generate an upgrade quote.  The hardware covered in this quote is certified by VCE and will always be supported and able to run at the current level of the Vblock Compatibility Matrix that the customer is on.  In addition, we’ll make sure to stay within the hardware family that the customer is currently using unless specifically asked not to, in order to maintain VMware HA and vMotion capabilities.

Because there are some additional requirements for these blades, the SP and the customer also put in place detailed Component and Platform Compliance policies.  One of the requirement, workload geo-location assurance, uses a feature of a new Intel processor that is only available in Cisco’s new B200M3 blade.  The FAST Cache implementation required by the application uses a total of (20) 100Gb SSD drives.  The customer already uses the RSA Archer platform to manage compliance levels at an application/OS level.

So what happens if something is done that violates one of those policies?  An alert could be thrown, of course!

Once the policies have been defined, both the SP and the customer could have piece of mind, while maintaining the separation of responsibilities that makes the outsourced private cloud so attractive!  The SP can move with the velocity their business model demands without fear of accidentally provisioning the wrong physical or logical configuration for their customer.  The customer can focus on the application and their business while maintaining a “trust but verify” posture, and can integrate the infrastructure itself into the standard tools they are using to show compliance with relevant controls.  The infrastructure platform, ordered, delivered, consumed, managed and monitored as a single object, becomes just another control that can be managed.

Wouldn’t that be neat? Stay tuned!

A brand new model in the Vblock 700-series line will be introduced with the Q3 Compatibility Matrix release that will give customers the option of choosing the new VMAX 40k.  VCE is also working on a concept of “modularity” with the 700-Series in order to give customers the option of choosing whichever Enterprise-class storage array they would like to sit at the storage core, including the VMAX 10K, VMAX 20K and VMAX 40K.

In addition to the core features supported by the new VMAX hardware, VCE will also be introducing a slew of new, tested, supported features for the Vblock 700 platform as well, including:

• Unified Network Architecture (No more MDS FC Switches!)
• Increased Blade Density
• Disjoint Network Support
• External File (CIFS/NFS) Support
• External Host Storage Access
• Flexible Uplink Configurations
• VMware vSphere 5.0 Auto-Deploy Support

As we move through the Vblock Life Cycle process and close out on the final pieces of testing, field sales and support enablement and integration into the Compatibility Matrix, we’ll push the upgraded code and the new hardware into the existing Vblock 700-Series products as well.

Specifically, Enginuity 5876 should be available in the Q2 Compatibility Matrix that will be available in early June for the existing Vblock 700 MX and LX lines.  This software offers a number of new features into existing VMAX and VMAXe arrays, including:

• Federated Tiered Storage: the ability to use external, existing storage arrays as a FAST VP Tier
• Unisphere for VMAX: new element manager provides a common look and feel when managing EMC storage
• EMC RecoverPoint Integration: The ability to natively split I/O and support the same RecoverPoint designs that the Vblock 300 and Vblock 700LX have been able to.
• SRDF for Vblock 700LX: Includes three-site functionality and expanded interoperability to other Vblock 700-Series platforms
• EMC TimeFinder VP Snap: Give the entire Vblock 700-Series space-efficient snaps for Virtual Pool (VP) devices
• New Drive Support: Support for 200GB EFD drives as well as 300GB and 600GB 10K SAS 2.5in drives in the Vblock 700LX

VCE couldn’t be more excited about our ability to support all the new goodness from the EMC side of the house.  Congratulations to everyone at EMC who is deservedly proud of getting this new platform out the door!

As a way of showing how a Vblock can provide both benefits, and to add on to the VNX announcements being made here at EMC World, I want to give everyone a peek into some of the Vblock features that are currently in testing to be released as part of upcoming Compatibility Matrix releases.  Most of these are either capabilities of the technology that’s in the Vblock 300 platform, or configurations that customers have asked for, and that we’ve formalized in order to be able to support them.  All are (or will be) offered as standard options when purchasing a Vblock, all will be certified and tested as part of a Compatibility Matrix and all will be handed by VCE one-call support.

• Unprecedented Storage Flexibility
  • Per-tier RAID Typing
  • New RAID Configurations (8+1 R5, 14+2 R6)
  • NFS Virtual Data Movers with Multi-LDAP Support
  • Automatic Storage Pool Re-Balancing
• I/O Bandwidth Enhancement – Block
  • Customers can choose to add FC or 10GbE expansion cards to increase bandwidth between the Fabric Interconnect and the storage array
• I/O Bandwidth Enhancement – File
  • Customers can choose to add additional 10GbE connections between the Fabric Interconnect and the VNX Data Movers
• Cisco UCS 2.0 Hardware Update
  • Vblock 300 will standardize on the Nexus 6248UP Fabric Interconnect with the 2104 FEX, offering 4x10Gb interconnects.
  • Customers will also be able to lever age the new 2208 FEX with 8x80Gb interconnects if more performance is needed.
• Virtual Switch (Nexus 1000v) Update
  • Addition of VXLAN to enable migration of virtual machines between servers across Layer 3 networks and address new requirements for scalable LAN segmentation.
  • Better integration with VMware vCloud Director
• External File Access
  • Enables customers to consolidate Enterprise-Wide NFS/CIFS functionality onto a single Vblock.  Using VNX Data Movers, this allows data resident on Vblock storage to be made available outside the platform without endangering the performance or availability of the Vblock itself
• Unified Network Architecture
  • Using the inherent multiprotocol – Fiber Channel, FCoE and Ethernet – switching capability of the Cisco Nexus 5548UP, customers can consolidate all switching (LAN and SAN) onto a single component within the Vblock.
  • In “low-throughput” environments (<160Mbps), Layer-3 capabilities can also be leveraged on the same switch, providing “core” switching functionality inside the Vblock!
• Data Encryption
  • Customers will be able to implement a full-array data encryption solution on the Vblock 300, the same way that Vblock 700 customer are able to now.
• Linux-Based VMware vSphere Appliance
  • Customers wishing to remove some Microsoft licensing from their management stack will have the option to utilize the vCenter vApp in the AMP.
• VMware vSphere 5.0 Auto Deploy
  • Decouples the VMware ESXi host from the physical server and eliminates the need for boot disk.
• Flexible Uplinks
  • Customers may select different uplink connections between Cisco UCS 2×00 FEX and Cisco UCS 6×00 Fabric Interconnects to increase compute density for a given Vblock configuration.
  • Allows an organization to select a Vblock Platform geometry that matches their service level requirements.

If you haven’t yet made the decision to base your IT infrastructure around a Vblock, make sure to ask your vendor how you take advantage of these features.  Remember, this isn’t just a statement that “sure, you can do it!”  It’s a fully supported, interoperability and performance tested set of configurations that preserve the scalability and balance of the Vblock platform.  It’s delivered to your data center pre-configured, and supported from end-to-end.  It’s a product with incredible flexibility that can support almost any enterprise workload, and can do it in a way that integrates in best with your existing processes and business requirements.

Looking at the list above, I see a lot of possibilities for how customers could implement a Vblock.  What about you?

Knowing this, there wasn’t any way I could resist pulling down the PDF announcement of the 2012 VMware vExpert group and playing around with the data!  It’s still not complete, and I’ll update the findings as people update their information, but here’s my first round of observations:

1. The vExpert group is still predominately US-based, but the gap is shrinking.  I’m still working through populating the final data, but the number of new vExperts from outside the US is fantastic.  It really reflects the growth of VMware internationally.
2. 349 of 433 vExperts are on Twitter!  I’ve created a Twitter list that automatically updates whenever one of the vExperts updates their information, you can see it here and follow it if you’d like.
3. 298 of 433 vExperts indicate some on-line presence like a website, online profile or blog.
4. 180 of 433 vExperts are new for 2012, and 93 vExperts from the 2011 list weren’t invited back.
5. There are 83 (!!!) vExperts who have made the list every year since 2009.
6. There are 64 vExperts who have made the list for three years.
7. There are 106 vExperts making the list for a second time.
8. 2 vExperts are returning to the list after an absence of 2 years!
9. 18 vExperts are returning to the list after an absence of 1 year.

351 of 433 vExperts have their employer publicly available, and the breakdown looks like this:

• VMware – 33 vExperts (16 new)
• EMC – 24 vExperts (6 new)
• Dell – 6 vExperts (1 new)
• NetApp – 6 vExperts (0 new)
• Veeam – 6 vExperts (2 new)
• PQR – 5 vExperts (2 new)
• VCE – 5 vExperts (1 new)
• Quest Software, Varrow, Xtravirt Ltd, HP – 4 vExperts each (1, 2, 2 and 1 new, respectively)
• 23 companies with 2 vExperts
• 205 companies with a single vExpert

One of the new things introduced to the 2012 vExpert mix was the three different paths that could be taken to gain inclusion in the group, Evangelist, Customer and Partner.  There isn’t enough information to draw any conclusions yet, but I’m interested to see which path the new vExperts took to get in.  I’d also be interested in seeing how many people applied for each path and to compare that to the numbers accepted, but VMware would have to release that information since it’s not publicly available.

Also interesting, and gratifying, are his expansive comments on VCE, our success and our close relationship with Cisco.  Since there’s a lot to dig through, I’d like to look more closely at some of the questions, and his responses.

Q: The big question I have is that based on what’s publicly available in your various filings, VCE is continuing to be operated at a loss. Cisco has a share of that loss, obviously. So how long do you keep funding VCE?

A: The answer to your question is, this is an investment we made in building a unique value proposition that is second to none. The success of VCE, going past $800 million in annualized run rate, that’s clearly going to drive $1 billion in data center infrastructure at the high end, and has been well worth the investment. We are extremely committed to the VCE model and extremely committed to the value we brought to customers. We think there’s a whole runway to expand the reach of VCE and our capabilities much more through the data center partnerships we share. We are committed 100 percent and achieved exactly what we wanted to, which is a unique model that no one else has. You will see announcements from others beginning to emulate the model that VCE established, and that adds credibility to the fact that we did the right thing.

Wow.  We’ve all heard the public comments from Joe Tucci and John Chambers, talking about how committed they are and how happy they are with the investments they have made in VCE, but it’s very gratifying to hear such a strongly worded statement from someone rooted in the tactical side of things.  Even better is that it seems to be an overwhelmingly positive, enthusiastic response to an unprompted, negative statement made by the interviewer.  There has been so much talked about with regard to the way that the principal investors report both their investments and their revenue from VCE it seems very strange that the interviewer hadn’t done enough homework to understand that his basic premise was incorrect.  Kudos to Mr. Lloyd for setting the record straight!

So, with a completely positive, forceful statement, you’d think that would be the end of the VCE questioning, right?  Well, no.

Q: But do you really need VCE? You’ve had astounding success with UCS and you get it as part of a package with the FlexPod model and other configurations, too. So why does Cisco need VCE at all?

Interesting follow-up question.  Despite stating that Cisco supports VCE 100%, the interviewer directly questions Cisco’s choice of business model, and completely misses the value to the customers that comes from a separate company driving the product.

A: I know what the difference is, and it’s a different value proposition. We are committed to that value proposition and expanding the options we have for partners.

There we go, back on track with that word “committed” again.  Surely that’s the end of the VCE questions…

Q: What is the big difference? Partners get the model and there’s no question they like the idea of the integrated stack, but why do you need the VCE company at all considering all the headaches VCE caused in the channel? Why do you need them when you can have a similar relationship to what’s there with NetApp for FlexPod?

My goodness.  Mr. Lloyd can’t possibly come out with another enthusiastic VCE response can he?  At this point he’s answered more questions about VCE than he has about HP!

A: The committed resourcing we put behind the level of integration with multiple platforms. The level of automation we’re trying to drive here is a differentiated offer, and I’ll come back to it one last time, the uniqueness of the Vblock offer is that customers are asking us to commit to that long-term integration and that’s reflected in the investments in VCE that we’re all going to continue to make and opening up that experience more in the future to offer options of consuming that. That’s why we’re going to mainstay the investment.

Bravo!  If I ever get to meet Rob Lloyd, I promise you he won’t be paying for his own bar tab.  Despite the interviewer not having done his homework on why Cisco invested in the original joint venture, why it makes sense for customers or what the difference is between a Vblock and a reference architecture, Mr. Lloyd continues to calmly turn away every pointed question.  But of course there are more.  Three more to be exact…

Q: So Cisco will continue to fund VCE?

A: Absolutely.

Q: You told me last summer that you had been personally involved in fixing the logistical headaches we’d seen from VCE, especially regarding the channel execution. What work did you do there?

A: You know, I think they solved a lot of the problems that existed themselves. We provided the feedback we heard from partners, and there has been huge progress. The No. 1 progress area has been the huge turnaround in Vblock delivery, the level of partner engagement, and we have some very successful stories we’d love to follow up with you on about how partners have been building VCE Vblock capabilities right into their core offers.

Q: VCE is a success?

A: VCE is a huge success. We made a market and achieved all of the objectives we set out, and achieved them probably faster than we expected.

In the final tally, CRN mentioned HP in three questions, Huawei in one, Dell in one and VCE in six.  I apologize if I find that incredible, especially with the huge impact that Cisco has in the competitive landscape.  I guess any press is good press, and while I’m extremely happy to see Mr. Lloyd’s comments and to see that CRN is obviously interested in the VCE story, I can’t help but think we, the readers, missed a chance to learn a lot about where Cisco is, the pressures they are facing and the state of their organization.  Maybe I am too close to VCE to understand why we’d be such a focus in this article, good press or not.

In the end, I want the take-away to be how much value and faith Cisco has in their partnership with VCE, and how successful that partnership has been in such a short period of time.  Mr. Lloyd said publicly what we have heard over and over from all of the parent companies and the VCE executive team from Michael Capellas down: we are unique in this space, what we do wouldn’t be possible from a partnership with a set of documents, the customers see that value as well and we are a strategic asset and GTM vehicle for the parent companies with a lot of commitment to increasing our scope and reach.

VCE is a huge success.  And there’s more to come.

So now that the veil has been lifted, let’s have a quick discussion about what it means for the larger converged infrastructure ecosystem.

First, I hope it’s very, clearly, painfully obvious that there’s no part of the VSPEX program that competes with VCE.  It’s a very flexible, channel delivered reference architecture, but it’s still a reference architecture.  I’ve written before that I think the reference architecture has a place in the discussion around converged infrastructure, but its value is not the same as a Vblock, no matter who is offering it.

Let’s look at it graphically:

With the launch of VSPEX, EMC is now able to offer all three options to customers, working with them to figure out which go to market strategy works best.  And to be sure, each has it’s own value.

Personally, I’m very excited that VSPEX has arrived.  It’s a great program for all the strong EMC channel partners out there, and it fills a gap that EMC had.  When we talk with customers about Vblock platforms, we know that there can be any number of reasons why a company isn’t ready or able to purchase the entire infrastructure as a product.  Maybe it’s a political alignment issue, maybe it’s a purchasing cycle issue, or maybe there’s an existing capital investment that has to be leveraged.  In those cases, we work hand-in-hand with the EMC vSpecialist team to help the customer find a V+C+E solution that makes sense, with great success.  However, the lack of any real framework and tested configurations that can be leveraged for those customers makes that design and implementation process harder than it might need to be at times, and VSPEX fills that gap.  It also makes it very easy for customers and partners who want a reference architecture offering to do business with EMC.

From what I see in the market, the enterprises that still buy pieces and parts of an infrastructure based on internal bias or legacy process and choose to do the complete integration and testing themselves are a dying breed.  Most of the customers we talk to love the idea of the Vblock, and are disappointed if their internal processes don’t allow them to move in that direction.  VSPEX gives EMC a less rigid, less integrated offering while still providing a level of assurance to customers.  That’s not competitive with VCE, that’s EMC putting the customer first and providing a product strategy that works no matter where that customer is in their journey to convergence.

Well, I’ve come to realize that day one of a major marketing event is much like a real-life game of Calvinball: it never comes off as you expected it to, you never have the same challenges twice and the best way to get through it is to laugh, go with the flow and enjoy it!

VCE is one of the platinum sponsors of Cisco Live in London (and Melbourne, and in the US) and our booth is fantastic.  The theater area is expanded, and we regularly had 30-50 people crowded around to hear about topics presented by VCE partners, employees and customers.  For the first time we also have two hands-on-lab stations where customers can get a self-paced walkthrough of the new version of our UIM/P provisioning a discovery tool.  In addition we have all the usual stations, including one with partner information, one with VDI solutions and more.  The event marketing team at VCE has done their usual bang-up job with the logistics.

Of course, day one is barely-organized chaos.  With one of our main event coordinators in her hotel bed with the flu, and with the rest of the team cutting their teeth in London, it was up to those of us who have been through the gauntlet before to settle things down pre-show.  Since my field enablement team (with the incomparable Jae Ellers and Tom Chatham) have done a number of these, we were able to get things moving.  Of course, some things are out of our control…

First presentation of the day, by Colt, one of our great Service Provider customers no less, and the power goes out to the whole booth.  The event staff gets things back in order quickly, and then we realize that the power cycle has wiped out the configuration on the Cisco-provided internet switch that is powering the hands-on-labs (copy run start is your friend, people). 20 minutes later the Cisco team gets that resolved, only to find out that there’s some issue upstream from us that’s affecting multiple exhibitors.  After about an hour, everything is back in working order and we can finally start settling into a groove…

But of course there are more issues.  iPads that haven’t been configured correctly, surveys that are a little tricky to submit, booth presentations that seem to have disappeared, booth personnel that seem to have disappeared, all of the day one things that could be issues, were issues.  Hey, it is the first event of the year, maybe we just got everything out of the way early, right?

Once we did get things settled down, the rest of the day ended up being great!  So many customers, so many people wanting to talk technology, strategy, positioning, convergence… The traffic stream through the booth was overwhelming at times, even with the team we had there to handle it, and by 2:00pm or so I was reminded why the marketing events are so important in our industry.  No where else could we reach so many people in such a short amount of time.

Two final things about day one before I get back to work.  First, Amy Lewis is awesome, and the entire Cisco Social Media presence is impressive.  The amount of energy she puts into everything is amazing, and while there are many cool things they are doing, the Cisco Services pinball machine is my favorite.  Of course I also have the high score, so I’m biased.  Aaron Delp talked a big game, but not even his vaunted foot kick could push him into the top spot…

Finally, most of you have probably see the Tweet and picture by now, but we had one of the NetApp FlexPod engineers come over from the booth next door and ask to run through the UIM hands on lab, which of course I was fine by me.  I’m not sure of the gentleman’s name, but over the course of the next hour we had a great conversation about the converged infrastructure market and management and orchestration stacks and he even made some suggestions for how we could improve the lab itself which I’ll have in place before the next event.  Sure, it was funny to have someone from NetApp asking to go through the lab, but it was a cool move by a smart engineer, and I think everyone came away better and more educated for it.  He was definitely a credit to his employer, and if there is anyone else who wants to come over and walk through UIM, please just let me know!

Day 2 is about to start (thank goodness for long cab rides…) so I’ll sign off here.  If you are at the event, please swing by the booth and say hi!

There are a bunch of new posts going up this week, with people encouraging voters, listing out their top blog posts of the year, and (of course) suggesting politely that a vote for them would be appreciated.  I’d imagine that the traffic bump seen by inclusion on the list is pretty significant, and Eric Siebert has done a great job of making this kind of community feedback process valuable.

That being said, I don’t want your vote.  More importantly, I don’t think I’ve earned your vote.  Yet.

2011 was easily the most interesting year of my professional career.  The move to VCE has been outstanding in almost every way.  I’ve met more customers, gotten more perspective, seen more technology, been closer to the leading edge and had more opportunities open up than I ever would have had in my previous job.

I’ve also struggled to stay focused on my blogging efforts.  I don’t think I did poorly, but based on the number of blog posts that I currently have in some state of completion (11) I could have done better.  I need to go back to setting aside time for research, reading and all of the other parts of the process, if I’m going to continue to improve.  I really do the act of creation, and I think I’m doing better finding my voice and my personality on the blog, I just need to put in the hours needed.  Like anything, repetition is the key to improvement, and I need more reps.

So rather than listing out my most popular post or pitching you on why you should vote for me, here’s a quick recap of the blogs that got my votes, and why.

First, I think the blogs that you gravitate towards are a personal thing.  Not everyone has the same likes and dislikes, and especially when it comes to content consumption, everyone has their own taste.  It’s not unlike preference in music when you think about it.  Everyone hears things slightly different, and that’s what makes it beautiful.  These are my preferences and opinions, but that certainly doesn’t mean yours aren’t valid!

I also made some basic rules for my voting.  Quantity and quality are not necessarily related, for sure, but I believe that if you are going to stand out from the enormous pack of content creators you need to have both.  If you go three months at a time without posting, even if every post you put up is brilliant, I probably didn’t vote for you.  I also think that it’s important to have at least a few posts over the course of the year that really stand out.  No one is going to hit a homerun every time, but you need to have cleared the fence a couple times.

My next preference is sure to make me few friends, but I’m also partial to people who work for the companies who make the technology that serves as the basis of our community.  Partially that’s because I don’t always understand this niche that exists where people can live in the margins between companies, and partly because I don’t think I understand the concept of “independent” very well.  It may mean “unaffiliated with a vendor” but it certainly can’t mean “unbiased”, and if the bias is going to be there without the 1st-hand knowledge of the technology and the roadmap, I think you may run into context issues.  The other possibility is that “independent” means “looking out for yourself first” in which case your bias runs towards the people, vendors and projects that pay you, which is the worst possible interpretation of the word, in my mind.  Also, I know how hard it is to be objective and provide good content within the structure of NDAs, roadmaps and partner relationships, and I respect those who can do it well.  There are lots of people who just end up being shills for their respective companies, but those people seem to get marginalized pretty quickly.

In my opinion, the design of the blog itself matters too.  Is it easy to read?  Does it have a decent mobile version?  Is it easy to comment on posts?  Is it searchable?  Is there an archive where I can look back by date and topic?  I’m sure there are plenty of people out there supplementing their income with ad revenue from their sites, but having your side covered with the same ads from the same companies as everyone else doesn’t do anything for your readers, does it?

Like with music, you need to play the instrument well.  Sentences have beginnings, middles, and endings.  Punctuation and spelling matter.  The voice you use to present your content should be consistent.  The content itself needs to be accurate and well researched.  It needs to be topical.  These are the basics, but they really do matter.

Finally, the only rule is that there are no rules, and some of the people who I respect the most definitely don’t always fit inside my rules. :-)

So without further blathering from me, here’s my Top 10.

#10 – Nick Weaver (http://nickapedia.com/) – A person I wish had more time to blog. Nick isn’t the most prolific, but he’s definitely worth waiting on. He’s all over the board technology-wise, which I can relate to, and from .NET front-ends for customer labs to node.js deployments to UBER tools to Kinect magic to evolutionary modeling of VMs, Nick has written about it all. One day I’ll get him to post the best techniques for opening bottles with rental car door handles, and the his blog will be perfect.

#9 – Chris Colotti (http://www.chriscolotti.us/) – Chris has quickly become one of my go-to resources for anything regarding vCloud technologies. From design to performance to gotchas to implementation, this blog has it all. He also drives Mopar vehicles with large engines, and gets bonus points for that. Chris has really started to find his writing voice, and I’m interested to see how he does in 2012.

#8 – Kendrick Coleman (http://www.kendrickcoleman.com/) – While I’m not the biggest fan of the design, Kendrick’s content more than makes up for it.  The free vSphere tools is a long-time favorite, but his VMware-related postings in general over the course of 2011 were top-notch.  His posts about vSphere network design and vCloud director were among the best of the year.

#7 – Scott Lowe (http://blog.scottlowe.org/) – My biggest complaint with Scott’s blog is that he doesn’t have more time to stay down in the weeds. When Scott gets rolling on a topic, like he did with FCOE and VxLAN, it’s must-read content for everyone involved in those technologies. The Short Takes are a great collection of links, but Scott’s commentary is equally valuable. The well-written content meshes nicely with the clean design, making this one of my favorites. If we can only find a way to make him write less about Macs… :-)

#6 – Andre Leibovici (http://myvirtualcloud.net/) – I think Andre has progressed more in his blogging in 2011 than anyone else I follow regularly.  His content around VDI is well researched, well explained, not afraid to buck convention and as authoritative as anyone out there.  In addition, his calculators (View, XenDesktop, Protocol) are must-have references for anyone who deals with VDI technology on a regular basis.  I’m very interested to see where some of his less….supported….View projects are going to take him in 2012.

#5 – Christofer Hoff (http://www.rationalsurvivability.com/blog/) – It’s hard to think of this as a “virtualization” blog, because the topics are so wide-ranging. I think of it more as a “shit smart people think about” blog, and that helps me put it in context. In addition to the high-quality of the content, it’s the sense of humor that really makes this blog stand out. Being serious and respectful to the content without being overbearing is no small feat, and really, how can you not like someone who decides that facing off (literally) with Vint Cerf is a good idea?

#4 – Cody Bunch (http://professionalvmware.com/) – The Brownbags are genius.  I mean that.  Of all the podcast/videocasts/whatever-casts that are out there, none is as practical, applies to as many people or as well executed (even if he does use GoToMeeting) as Cody’s.  It doesn’t hurt that the rest of the non-Brownbag content is solid as well, and it really establishes Cody as one of the few “independents” that I read regularly.

#3 – Simon Seagrave – (http://www.techhead.co.uk/) – It’s possible, although unlikely, that Simon’s creation of vBeers would have gotten him on my list regardless.  Of course, there’s way more than that.  Way, way more.  Simon’s blog has so much content, that the lack of a good archive page is almost a benefit: it keeps you from spending too much time browsing.  One of the first people in the home vSphere lab discussion, Simon is also a great resource for that topic as well, and one of the people I leaned on most where building out my own lab.

#2 – Eric Sloof (http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/) – It seems like almost every time I need to do a Google search for something regarding virtualization, Eric’s blog comes up.  With some of the best videos and walkthroughs in the business, this is another site that you can spend way too much time on.  It’s obvious that Eric has deep knowledge of the VMware space, but he also does an excellent job of communicating that knowledge to people.

#1 – Chad Sakac (http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/) – It was hard getting my top 10 selected, it was not hard to figure out where Chad needed to be on the list.  I don’t know where he finds the time to write, nor how he finds the time to stay in the weeds of the technology up to his elbows, but he consistently drops posts that are unique, timely and incredibly valuable.  If you are interested in the storage and virtualization technology ecosystems at all, Chad is the place where you hear about the direction the biggest players are headed first.  His excitement for his job and the tech comes through loud and clear, and I can’t wait to see what he comes out with in 2012.

Honorable Mentions:

Duncan Epping (http://www.yellow-bricks.com/)

William Lam (http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/)

Tommy Trogden (http://vtexan.com/)

Josh Atwell (http://www.vtesseract.com/)

Clint Kitson (http://velemental.com/)

Matt Brender (http://itechthereforeiam.com/)

Jay Cuthrell (http://fudge.org/)

There are so many (SO MANY) smart, talented, community-minded people out there, I’m sure I forgot someone.  If so, and if you are that person I forgot, please accept my humblest apologies, and I promise to pick up the tab next time we are in the same place.  The thought that there are people out there who look at me the same way I look at the people I’ve listed above, and the realization that I WANT people to look to me that way, are what drives me to be more, and try harder.  Thank you all, and go vote!

One of the more interesting comments that came out this week was after our CTO, Trey Layton, presented the 2012 “Vblock Value” deck for the assembled crowd.  One of our friends from VMware stood up and said the following:

Having sat in on presentations with Dell, HP and IBM, I can tell you that every one of them is presenting this exact same story.  You could cut and paste their names over yours, and it would be identical.  The difference is that you can actually back up those claims with substance, and they can’t.  The trick is helping customers see that, and helping them understand the questions to ask when considering converged infrastructure. 

The truth is, as we’ve entered a competitive landscape where there are really only four companies that can offer a true converged infrastructure (VCE, IBM, HP and Oracle), we see more and more how our original talk track from 2010 and early 2011 is being incorporated into the messaging that we see from those competitors today.  Partly, that’s awesome: how better to judge the impact you are having on a market than to watch your (much) larger competitors reuse your marketing.  Partly, it’s a sign that we need to continually move up and to the right.  We aren’t flying under anyone’s radar anymore, and there are sharks in these waters.

To illustrate this point, let’s play a game we played during Michael Capellas’ keynote on the first day of kick-off.  We call it: “Who IS That Masked Machine?”

Each of the paragraphs below is an exact cut-and-paste from publicly available sources, which I’ll cite below with the answers.  Read the description, think about the messaging that VCE has been putting out for the last two years, and then guess which vendor is involved.

Masked Machine #1

Cloud computing offers many potential benefits, including improved service delivery and reduced operating costs. Yet the challenges of installing and configuring a private cloud platform can be overwhelming. [redacted] provides a preintegrated and preloaded system with software, servers, storage, networking and…services to help you take the guess work out of establishing a private cloud computing environment. [redacted] can help you get up and running in days, not months.

• Preintegrated, service delivery infrastructure accelerates deployment of private cloud
• Sophisticated self-service portal, service catalog and automated workflows to save operating costs
• High-performance and resilient architecture maximizes virtualization efficiency and return on investment
• Automated management and superior reliability minimizes complexity, lowers risk and maintenance costs
• Designed to scale easily to match resources to changing business needs and adapt to new requirements

Masked Machine #2

[redacted] is designed to simplify the deployment of infrastructure, applications and cloud services by delivering IT capacity through pools of readily deployed resources. The goal of [redacted] is to accelerate provisioning, optimize IT capacity across physical and virtual environments and to ensure predictable delivery and service levels.

Ideal for…

Dynamic infrastructure provisioning

• Faster time to business value by provisioning services within minutes instead of months
• On-demand storage provisioning in minutes during the deployment of a service
• Improve utilization by enabling users to check out and return resources from a central pool
• Streamline test and development processes by easily converting servers from virtual to physical and back

Masked Machine #3

[redacted] is a complete hardware and software platform for Enterprise applications delivered by [redacted] as pre-assembled building blocks that are easy to buy, deploy and operate.

[redacted] is an Engineered System: an assemblage of best-of-breed storage, compute, network, operating system and software products that are integrated, tested, tuned, optimized, delivered and supported by [redacted] as a single factory-assembled unit.

[redacted] is designed to provide extreme high performance, reliability, ease-of-use and versatility without being a proprietary, closed system with high total cost of ownership and vendor lock-in. [redacted] is everything enterprises love about both mainframes and open systems with none of the stuff they don’t. [redacted] is the realization of a new way of looking at the role of IT in the modern enterprise.

• Fully integrated compute nodes, storage and networking
• Fully integrated…network attached storage appliance with 40TB of SAS disk storage
• …IO Fabric, with 40 Gb/second throughput and microsecond latencies
• Data center service network integration with 10 GbE

Wow. I understand that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but I think some people need to send flowers to the VCE marketing team.  At least a thank you would be nice.  So who are our masked machines?  Were you able to guess?  I left some clues in there to give you a few hints.

Masked Machine #1: IBM Cloudburst™ On System X

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/x/solutions/cloud/cloudburst/index.html

The use of the word “services” multiple times definitely gives this one away, I know.  Let’s give IBM credit where it’s due: they were very, very early out of the gate (June, 2009) with the concept of a converged infrastructure, largely based on the strength of their services arm.  With Cisco announcing their entry into the x86 server market in March of that same year, and with the first of the V+C+E implementations starting to roll out, IBM reacted far quicker than the rest of the industry to the coming threat.  Their ace in the hole is now, and always will be, their services arm which is the class of the world.  Understand that the acquisitions of Perot Systems and EDS by Dell and HP respectively were intended to try and balance the scales that were tipped heavily in IBMs favor because of the Global Services organization.

Masked Machine #2: HP CloudSystem Matrix

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/ products/blades/components/matrix/index.html

HP was particularly late to the converged infrastructure game, and they arguably needed to do the most catching up from a technology standpoint.  Rocked by the Cisco entry into their backyard, HP responded by buying 3COM in April, 2010.  Most of us questioned the idea of HP paying $2.7B to acquire a networking vendor who had once famously exited the core router/switch market because they couldn’t get any traction, just so that they could offer an alternative to Cisco, a company who dominated that same market.  I’ve heard claims that HP is 100% 3COM in their data centers, and I can tell you that they are the only company I’ve ever heard of who make that claim.  After declaring war on Cisco, HP went to work replacing other parts of their portfolio that needed refreshing.  In October of 2010 they replaced the aging, underwhelming EVA storage line with the acquisition of 3Par, and using the previous acquisition of Opsware, started putting together a converged infrastructure of their own.  Finally, in June of 2011, HP released the Converged Systems portfolio that we know today.

Masked Machine #3: Oracle Exalogic

http://blogs.oracle.com/exalogic/entry/what_is_oracle_exalogic / http://www.oracle.com/us/products/middleware/exalogic/

Oracle, looking to lock customers into more support dollars than just the application stacks they already owned, bought Sun Microsystems in January of 2010.  Using that acquisition they pulled one of the most drastic flip-flops in the history of technology and went to market with Exalogic in September of that same year.  Sun hardware?  Sun STORAGE?  Interesting.  Oracle, to their credit, is able to build hardware that services the exact performance needs of the application stack (because they ARE the application stack), but as customers look more and more to a multi-use infrastructure, having to manage hardware that is limited to a single platform use-case is challenging.  In contrast, Oracle on VMware in general and Oracle on Vblock specifically are two of the fastest growing segments of the VMware/VCE business.

In my opinion, these are the only three companies that are, today, providing offerings that are competitive with VCE, and they will be the ones we discuss in this series going forward.  Dell may enter into this space at some point (I expect them to), but there are too many holes in both their product offerings and their go-to-market to spend a lot of time on them now.  Reference Architecture-based products are similarly discounted, since building something on your own is exactly what we are getting away from with the concept of a converged infrastructure.

If you look at the timeline, there has been a tremendous amounts of partnering and acquisition since VCE was formally introduced in late 2009.  It’s very fun to be on the leading edge of something this big, and it’s gratifying to see our efforts moving the needle across the industry, but I know there are a lot of moving parts.  Especially for companies whose core competency isn’t IT, and who don’t want to make a huge investment in that space, there’s a opportunity for us to better explain the landscape, the challenges and the opportunities.

So with all that said, the plan is to write a series of blog posts helping customers figure out how to move forward.  Everyone focuses on the management aspect, but I think there are many companies out there who don’t understand the complexity of choosing a platform, streamlining a business model around a platform, building a team to support the platform and leveraging that platform across application teams.  So in the spirit of education, we’ll go through the following topics together:

How To: Choose the Right Converged Infrastructure
How To: Use a Converged Infrastructure to Generate Revenue
How To: Maximize Operational Efficiency with a Converged Infrastructure
How To: Build a Converged IT Operations Team
How To: Optimize a Converged Infrastructure for Multiple Workloads
How To: Choose a Management and Orchestration Strategy

Are there other topics that need to be covered?  Let me know in the comments below, and if there’s enough interest we can add them.  The goal here is for everyone to better understand the lay of the land in order to make better decisions going forward. With some of the announcements that VCE has queued up for the first half of 2012, I’m very much looking forward to walking through these topics and more!

What do you think?  Is the idea of a converged infrastructure a fundamental shift in how hardware is managed, consumed and acquired?  Or is it simply a part of the larger business cycle in an environment where capital availability has its highs and lows?  Comments are always welcome (with company disclosure if appropriate) below!

I’d like to introduce you to my dad, Rich Dooley.

Now, I know that everyone’s dad is special, but I’d like to think mine is a bit on the extraordinary side.  I think it would be awesome at some point to sit down with him and the people who know him and write his life’s story, since even the parts that I know about, as his oldest son, are pretty unique.  He spent 20+ years in the US Army, starting in tanks and moving into personnel and transportation as he and my Mom decided to have a larger family.  My brother and I were born while they were at Fort Bragg, and then we all moved to Oberursel, Germany for the next seven years.  In 1986 we moved back to the states, with my Dad being posted at USCENTCOM in Tampa, Florida.  After the first Gulf War, we relocated for the last time, moving to Vienna, Virginia so Dad could work for the Joint Chiefs at the Pentagon.

My dad served as an enlisted soldier in the US Army for more than 20 years.  He served on the front lines in West Germany during the Cold War, served in the command center during the first Gulf War and then served in the Pentagon for everything since.  He’s played war games against the Russians, he’s processed visas for US troops in the middle east and he’s had people fly airplanes through the windows of the office building he works in.  He and my Mom raised six kids on the salary of a E-5, took us all over the world and made sure we got the opportunities they never had.  They did all this, and still built for us a relationship with both of their families that lasts until today.  They even made sure that every one of us was actually born inside the US, no matter where we happened to be stationed, so that each of us would be able to be President, if we wanted to, although it’s fair to say that my politics are a little different from theirs!

More than all of that, my father is a musician.  Not a sing in the car, karaoke after a couple beers kind of guy; a no-shit, world-class, unbelievable musician.  Long before I was born, his world revolved around guitars and bands with his friends, and that certainly didn’t change much with time.  After we moved Germany, my dad joined a country-rock band called the Country Drifters and we spent the 7 years we were there touring Germany.  He started off playing bass, and then moved over to lead vocals over time, and it’s still some of the best memories of my childhood.  Seriously, how many kids have heard crowds of people screaming at their dad to play “Freebird”?  You’d think that the band would be made up of all GIs, but it wasn’t at all.  With members from Germany, England and elsewhere, it opened my eyes to a larger world that most American kids don’t get.  To this day, I feel bad for everyone who spent their childhood in one place.

The music business wasn’t always fun, I don’t think, but it was his passion.  Even a horrible car wreck on a snowy highway in Germany (FYI: semi-trucks always win in fights with VW Beetles) couldn’t stop him.  Once we came back to the states, he never joined another formal band, partly because us kids were getting older.  Instead of being a band leader, he became a Boy Scout troop leader and a Little League dad.  That certainly didn’t mean the music stopped, it just meant that it was an everyday thing instead of an event-driven thing.  Friends coming over?  Get out a guitar.  Holiday?  Let’s get the whole family singing.  For my dad, it was effortless.  Have you ever seen an athlete or a co-worker or someone who is so obviously, easily good at something they didn’t even notice it?  That was my dad with a guitar in his hands.  Literally, I used to try and stump him by asking him to play things that he’d never heard before, just to see if he could do it.  Once, I asked him to play an acoustic cut off of a Van Halen album (316, the 10th track off of 1991’s For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge album), and he did it, perfectly, the first time having ever heard it.  After that, I quit trying.

The funny part about being that good at something is that you tend to, whether you do it consciously or not, take it for granted.  It happens when you’ve been so good at something for so long, that you forget how much work it was to become good in the first place.  It’s even harder to avoid when you are naturally predisposed to being good at that thing.  I don’t think it’s a failing so much as it’s the natural way of things: we obsess about the things we want to be better at, not the things we are incredible good at.

In 2007, my dad had a stroke.

It wasn’t a bad one, in the grand scheme of things.  When my mom called and told me what happened, the worst thoughts possible came to mind.  There’s probably no need to recount everything that went through my head, I’m sure you can imagine.  The truth turned out to be both better….and worse.  My dad had been slowly losing his hearing for years, but the stroke went one step further.  It took away his ability to hear pitch, and to be able to make the connection between what he was hearing and what he was playing.  He lost the one thing he was better at than anything in the world.

On one hand, I’m worried about my dad.  He’s nearing his second (and hopefully) final retirement, but at 59 he’s still relatively young.  The frustration on his face as he tries to work through chord changes, and as he plays along with the kids singing Christmas carols kills me, and I can only imagine how much it affects him.  In the last couple years, he’s made progress in his recovery, but there’s still a ways to go.  My mom has been a huge part of his recovery, both cajoling him to put in the work to re-learn the things the stroke took away and in helping him find other activities to put his energy in.

On the other hand, I wonder what I’m taking for granted.  I recognize that I have been incredibly lucky in my life, and particularly in my career, to the point where I’m a little reluctant to think about it.  Am I taking any of my abilities for granted?  Am I taking for granted the fantastic places I’ve been able to work?  Am I taking the people who I work with for granted, people who have given so much, so freely?  What are the skills that have made me successful?  Am I neglecting them?  What about my beautiful, incredible family?  My wife?  Am I so comfortable with any of those things that I’ve forgotten to put in the effort needed to maintain them?

What about you?  Are you paying attention to the foundation?  Are you forgetting to pay attention to the things you are so good at, and the people you are so close to, that have served you so well, that have gotten you so far?  I bet you are.  I know I am.

In the end, I think about my dad.  I think about his gift.  It’s hard for me to imagine being as good at anything as he was/is at music, and I have no way to relate to losing even a part of something like that.  It terrifies me.  It makes me unspeakably angry.  It makes me sad.  It makes me want to look around, take stock, reprioritize.  It makes me want to work harder, be more, do more.  It makes me want to pick up a guitar, something I’ve been too intimidated to even try for most of my life; I mean really, how do I follow in those footsteps?  It makes me want to try, and in the end, isn’t that inspiration something all dad’s are supposed to do give their sons?

Of course, for every good team, comprised of good teammates, there are bad teams and bad teammates. Nothing can hurt the overall success of a company, team or project more than a lack of teamwork, and it’s important to look around at where you are and try to figure out if you are part of the problem or part of the solution. No matter where you are, or what you do as an individual contributor, your responsibility is to make the people above you successful. I don’t care if you don’t like your boss, I don’t care if you are more qualified than your position demands, your job is to ensure that you are doing everything you can to make your team successful.

In “Rounders”, Mike McDermott says “If you can’t spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, then you ARE the sucker.” I say the same thing holds true for teams: If you can’t see the part of your team that needs improvement, it’s possible YOU are the part that needs it! Luckily, improving yourself as a teammate is something we should all be doing ALL the time, so there’s no shame in seeing, or being told, that you have work to do.

In my opinion there are two kinds of teammates you need to watch out for. The first is the guy who confuses talking loudly with leading. You know this guy: it’s all about him. Regardless of his role it’s always “his” team. It’s always about what project he’s working , or what customer he’s engaged with. He uses the word “I” incessantly in internal communication. He’s probably not a bad guy, and he’s definitely smart, but he doesn’t make the whole team better because he isn’t leading them anywhere, he’s just yelling about where he’s been, and where he’s going.

The other kind of teammate that worries me is the malcontent who acts like a cancer, hurting the team from the inside out. You know this guy too: he’s the one who’s always putting the team, and his teammates down, sometimes without even realizing it. “You know what, I’ll just do it myself” may be the single worst thing that a teammate can ever say. There are many reasons why one of your teammates could be unhappy, but ultimately few of them matter. If you can’t come to the group prepared to leave your individual issues at the door and further the cause of making the people above you successful, you aren’t helping the cause.

I’m an optimist, so I think even these kinds of teammates just aren’t self-aware enough to know they are causing a problem, so how can you help them? Here’s some rules I’ve learned throughout my team-building career that may help:

• Make a rule limiting the number of times you use the word “I” in internal communications. If everyone is doing their job right, there’s no place for “I” inside the group. Use “we”, “us” or “the team” instead. Hold yourself accountable and hold the rest of the team accountable on this one. If you are going to succeed, do it together. (this one came from Monty Blight, my boss at Peak 10, and it’s one I like the most!)
• You can never have enough internal communication! Whether it’s in person, phone, e-mail, social media or IM, you can’t know who your teammates are and what they are capable of doing without keeping the lines of communication open and using them often!
• Go out of your way to understand the structure of your team: what role are you there to fill? How are you supposed to interact and with who? The more you understand the dance steps, the better you will be able to dance!
• Understand what your immediate manager needs to be successful, because that’s your first priority. Look, I’ve worked for my share of managers who didn’t have any idea about how to organize a team. They weren’t ever going to be successful because they didn’t communicate what they needed to the group! If you find yourself in that situation, go up the ladder another rung, and find out what your manager’s manager needs to be successful. At some point you are going to find someone who understands how to leverage a team well enough, and when you do, get as aligned as you can. I’ve had times where I was aligned with someone two or three levels above my manager, and that’s OK. Be tactful in how you do it, but success can roll downhill too, and as long as you stay focused on being aligned with what the people above you need, good things will happen!
• If you find you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room. Every job has a timeline, and the better you are a recognizing that you are nearing the end of yours, the easier it will be to keep the team headed in the right direction. Know when it’s time to start looking for something new, communicate that fact to your manager and work to stay challenged!
• Know when you are oversharing. Especially for those of us (and I include myself in this group at times) for whom business travel is a part of the job, it’s hard to remember how much of a privilege that it. Sure, we fly a lot, and sure we get some of the perks that come with that (airline status, upgrades, etc…) but there are a lot of people out there who would love to be in our shoes. Spend too much time sharing where you’ve been, or what status level you are and you risk overshadowing the reason you got that job in the first place: how good you are at it! Especially distressing can be the complaints! Yes, it’s a pain when you only have status on one airline and you need to start flying another one. Yes, not getting that upgrade on an international flight can be an inconvenience. Sure, we’ve all been stuck in an airport, or had weeks where we lived in them. Yes, sometimes it’s hard being away from our families for extended amounts of time. But we have been entrusted with a job that many people aspire to, and sometimes we need to remember how all that complaining looks to the outside.

How about for you managers out there, new and old? Well the ability to have a successful team begins with you! Here are some things I’ve learned about building teams that may help:

• Have a plan, have a plan, have a plan! Good things happen on accident, but not often, so sit down with your stakeholders and figure out what role your team needs to play. Put together a plan for the skillsets needed, and how the team needs to be laid out.
• Hire with a purpose. Target skillsets or abilities that your team needs, and at the level your team needs. Don’t settle! Both the “he’s so brilliant we need to hire him even though we don’t know where he’ll fit” and the “he’s such a great guy that he’ll be great for the team” hires will get you in trouble. Be disciplined in putting the right people in the right places, since these are the people who you are going to make you successful!
• Be careful of hiring people with whom you have a pre-existing relationship, and make sure you understand and acknowledge the impact that can have on the team. Listen, who you know can be more important than what you know, and all of us have relationships that have helped us find and take advantage of opportunities. That being said, even a good plan and a good team and a good manager can be undone by hiring someone for the wrong reasons. Even more importantly, the presence of a relationship can make hires that were done in good faith look bad when things don’t go well. If you are going to hire someone you are close to, understand that they will (fairly or not) have to over-deliver for a time until they are fully a part of the team!
• Fire people when necessary. As a manager, the grown-up pants come standard, and sometimes you have to wear them. People change and goals change, and sometimes that means that teams have to change too. No one revels in the process, but for the good of the team sometimes you have to make changes, and that involves firing people who aren’t being part of the solution. Of course, this is always tricky: fire too soon or too often, and it becomes a reflection on your ability to hire the right people, and wait too long and you hurt the team. Again, the key here is communication, communication and more communication.
• Be prepared to pivot. Every team will be asked to head in a new direction at some point, be ready for it. Maybe the challenge will be to take a small group and scale it. Maybe the challenge will be to take a local group global. Maybe it’ll be to take a team of people and use them to solve a whole new business challenge. Embrace these situations, because they will be the ultimate validation of your team and of your ability to lead it.
• Know what kind of manager you are. Some managers excel at “managing up” and making sure that the team has the right level of exposure to the upper management group. Some manager excel at “managing down” and taking care of the tactical job of delivering on goals. A few managers can do both equally well. Understand which kind of manager you are and build the team to balance your strengths.
• Don’t be afraid to lead, as well as manage! I’m a huge believer in leading from the front, In most organizations there’s no longer a place for the traditional middle-manager, and moreover those kinds of managers are hard-pressed to sustain the respect of a team, especially in technology companies. Best case, in my opinion, is a manager who can lead the team by example, helping the rest of the team become better at their jobs and able to jump in and help out when things are busy, or the team is short. If you are a manager and you can’t do the core job of the people you are managing, you are at a severe disadvantage.

What do you think? How does your team stack up? What are the best and worst teams you’ve been part of? Are you a good teammate or manager? How can you help your team be better? Feel free to join the discussion in the comments below, and for all of you in the US enjoy the rest of your long holiday weekend!

First, both the CA team and the CA World event were absolutely top notch, The general session on Sunday evening with Bill McCraken (CA CEO), Michael Capellas (VCE Chairman), Vivek Kundra (First CIO of the US) and Randi Zuckerberg was outstanding. The level of discussion and the collective knowledge on the panel was excellent. I’ve never attended a kick-off keynote on a Sunday evening before, but this one was definitely worth it.

VCE occupied a very interesting place in this conference. First, we were the only infrastructure company to have a full converged stack on the floor, and thanks to our Platinum sponsorship we were right up front and center. The irony was that it seemed like most of the attendees were a little intimidated by the racks on display. Where as at EMC World, VMworld and Cisco Live there are people crawling in, over and around the cabinets asking questions, almost every question we got at CA World was about how the infrastructure fit into a larger picture. I loved it. People wanted to know about the solutions that were supported, the intersection with the CA product sets and how both could be leveraged together. We did a ton of VDI sessions as well as a lot of orchestration and management demos, all of the running right on the Vblock in the booth. It was a very different audience and experience than the other shows, but it had a rhythm and pace all of its own, and it was a welcome change.

Of course, it’s always fun to talk to customers when you have such an incredibly compelling story. The CA/VCE partnership is in many ways a model for how a converged infrastructure can enable the business processed that the customer needs to maintain without forcing a greenfield approach. In the slide on the left we see how core (and relatively small) a role the actual infrastructure plays in the overall framework here, and that’s as it should be. We aren’t doing IT for the sake of IT, we are doing it for the end users and their applications, and anything that takes the focus away from that isn’t needed or relevant. From security, performance and SLA monitoring and alerting, automation and orchestration and business service modeling and management, the integration between CA and VCE is top-notch and I’m very excited to see where we go from here, and how we can help make each other better.

I also got a chance (finally!) to be part of the Cloudcast podcast series, and Aaron Delp and I got to sit down with Andi Mann from CA and talk about consumption models, trends that are starting to show and a good bit about Andi’s background and career. What a cool, smart guy. Totally enjoyed it and I’m hoping I get invited to do the podcast again at some point. If you are interested, you can check it out here.

To put it bluntly, VCE has kicked ass at all of the events that we’ve attended this year. With it being our first year in the ring, so to speak, we did a lot of learning, a lot of guessing and hoping, and a lot of busting our butts to make sure the story got out to the people. VCE exceeded every single metric we set as a target for those events, and there’s a fantastic group of people who’ve made that happen. Most of the credit goes to Mary Martinez, Jeff Siteman and Tina McNulty from the marketing team. They had a vision for these events and have worked tirelessly to make it happen. There’s also an incredible core group of vArchitects who volunteered to be in the foxhole together, and have been able to react to any situation and pull off what sometimes seemed impossible. Tom Chatham (Mr. Vblock), Jae Ellers, Jay Cuthrell and Aaron Delp are all complete rock stars, and getting to watch them work with customers at these events is awesome. Our booth is ridiculous. Rarely is there anyone on a conference floor who can match the functionality of the VCE setup with the awesome visuals. Having a fully functional, live Vblock in the middle of the booth has become a staple of the setup, and the customers love it. If you are a competitor who is handing out collateral at a tiny booth at these shows, we have been, and will continue to eat your lunch. Fair warning, it only gets more awesome for us from here.

Of course no good deed goes unpunished, and so we’ve been given an even higher bar to clear in 2012. The team will more than triple the number of events we participate at, and VCE is making a huge investment in that. More Vblocks, more staff, more demos, more [redacted]. It’s going to be awesome, and I can’t wait to see how it unfolds. The 2012 year will start in London with Cisco Live, and we are working furiously behind the scenes to roll out a couple surprises for everyone. Stay tuned and I hope to see you at one of the events in 2012!

Part of why I love Twitter is because it’s an organic place where a conversation can unfold, either in real-time or after the fact.  You can catch a snippet of a thread, dig through the multiple conversations that got the discussion to that point and watch the multiple players as they respond.  Last night, somehow, the topic was how every IaaS provider and customer was somehow competing with AWS, whether they liked it or not, and as part of that thread the following statement was made by George Reese, CTO of enStratus:

While this was one of the more sound-byte worth comments in the thread, the basic premise (as I understand it) was that AWS has become the defacto standard for all IaaS deployments anywhere, and in achieving this milestone they have set the bar for business model, features, price and functionality in many ways.  Here’s another good quote from the thread from Randy Bias over at Cloudscaling:

Now, I’ve never met Randy (and I hope to), but from what I’ve seen he’s possibly the biggest AWS fan on the face of the planet, at least that I’ve ever met.  Whether it’s calling them a “runaway train” and predicting $16B in revenues or calling them a “game changer” and “the primary measuring stick for all IaaS”, Randy obviously likes what he sees.  Every option, has at it’s core an assumption (or many), and I think that’s where my thinking about AWS and IaaS in general diverges from Sirs Reese and Bias.  This notion that the buyer of technology services is shifting from IT to application developers just isn’t one that I see regularly as I talk to both enterprises and service providers.  I even forgive Randy and George for picking on VCE and the Vblock specifically, since I’ve learned that’s just what happens when you are the most recognizable and successful entry into any marketplace.

In every one of these discussions, I see the same names brought up as proof-points: Amazon, Google, Netflix, Salesforce.com, Facebook…  What I don’t understand is how some of these companies even end up being part of the discussion, especially when the topic is a comparison to enterprise IT.  How many times do we have to rehash the fact that Facebook isn’t representative of IT, at least not it’s massive, public-facing side?  It’s a single application, scaled to incredible size, ditto for Salesforce.com and Netflix.  That’s not IT, where there can be dozens of applications sitting side-by-side, some developed in-house, some bought off the shelf, each one having it’s own development and maintenance cycle.  You can’t, I repeat, CAN’T, put that kind of workload footprint in the cloud.  And for anyone who says “legacy is shit, you need to start developing your way out of that hole” I tell you to wake up and look at the reality of today.

Would it be great if every enterprise had every application they needed developed in-house and/or on a common platform with all of the resiliency, redundancy and availability built in?  Abso-frickin-loutely.  THAT would be a game changer.  It would change the basic premise under which the concept of application delivery would run, and (finally) put all of the focus on the apps and the customer experience, where it belongs.

HOWEVER, even that drastic a departure from reality wouldn’t change either the overall IaaS market, or the opportunities that exist for the service provider community.  Some people are going to want/need to run the infrastructure inside their own firewall, some people are going to want to outsource it.  Some people will need to build data centers, some people won’t.  Hell, some people will be good at building enterprise-class, “cloud-ready apps” and some won’t, and those that won’t will want help.  Hopefully, most enterprises will stay as close to their core competency as they can, and give away those functions that don’t need to be part of the business model.

So with all of that said, could one of these magic unicorn clouds, internal or external be hosted on a Vblock (or any other converged infrastructure stack)?  Of course it could.  Would a service provider choose to host their magic unicorn service on a Vblock?  Of course they could.  How is this possible?  Because I dispute the basis of the argument that AWS and their disciples put out: limiting functionality, putting the onus for availability and driving the cost of resources to the lowest possible point by using commodity hardware with a high rate of failure isn’t what the enterprise market demands.  It just isn’t.  Yet.  Now, you could (and should as a good skeptic) argue that Randy and George are pushing a business model that ultimately meshes with their respective companies, and that I am pushing one that meshes with mine, and that would be very fair.  After all, if you don’t know any of us how do you trust our motivations?  In return I’d ask you this: what are YOU seeing in YOUR enterprise?  What are you hearing about in others?  What are you seeing out of the Federal government space?  What are you hearing from your security and compliance teams?  At the end of the day, however unwelcome it may be, reality is what it is, and the reality where IT is even MOST of that way towards a completely programmatic consumption mode is just fiction.  Chris Hoff with Juniper Networks summed it up well later in the conversation when he said:

I certainly agree, AWS has had an impact on the market mostly because they introduced the world to a new way of consumption, one that didn’t necessarily exist before.  For those enterprises who needed it, AWS was a great new answer.  You can’t ignore their growth or their level of innovation, and I can’t help but be impressed by both.

Of course, in my heart of hearts, I lament the fact that we live in this reality.  Having been an end user, service provider, and infrastructure vendor, I hate that we have to abstract and virtualize our way around the legacy limitations of our collective IT past.  No application user has ever cared about the brand of fabric switch or server that was used.  They want a good experience with the applications they need, and that’s it.  Everything else is secondary to them, but unfortunately it will take some time for the enterprise to catch up and be able to focus the lion’s share of their attention and resources in that direction.  Reality is what it is, not what we wish it to be.

What do you think?  On a continuum from legacy to fully public cloud where is your company?  Where are you moving to be?  Does the term IaaS need to have some additional context to it so that we don’t conflate one kind of consumption model with another?  Disclosure of affiliations and common courtesy is always appreciated in the comments!

All my whining aside, it’s been a great show so far!  There’s a very different vibe (as expected) to the event, with Copenhagen and Las Vegas being very different places (to say the least).  The weather hasn’t been great, but it hasn’t put a damper (ha!) on the event at all.  Copenhagen is a very interesting place, even if we didn’t get much of a chance to explore.  Luckily my co-worker Tom and his wife Jenny played chauffer and tour guide for a little while, so we did get to see some of the sights!

You may have noticed that I was absent from almost all social media for the first couple days of the event, and there was a very good reason for that!  I jumped in to help out the VCE Sales team and took a meeting with a customer on short notice.  The only challenge was that the customer happened to be in Paris.  It was a long day of plane rides (one of which had a fire on board, necessitating a quick evacuation and moving to a new plane), car rides (Paris isn’t all that pretty in the rain and on a highway…) but in the middle was a fantastic meeting with Orange Business Systems.  I got to meet their head of cloud computing marketing and one of the business and product development executives, and we had a great lunch.  The conversation ranged around a bit, but we talked about the philosophy of product development, the future of cloud-focused M&O and even dove a little into the VCE roadmap covering the next few quarters.  Like most SPs they are very, very aware of the amount of time between purchasing infrastructure and when that infrastructure starts generating revenue.  The Vblock and VCE solution focus are both things that meshed well with them.

From a VCE standpoint, the event was another in a string of successes in getting our brand, the value of the Vblock and the ever-growing stack of solutions developed on top of it out to the public.  Over the course of the show, more than 40% of the attendees of the conference had their badges scanned at the VCE booth, and the list of follow-up tasks I have with people who had questions or asked for more in-depth discussion after the show is insane.  Thank goodness I can scan business cards in with my phone!  The entire event marketing team outdid themselves (again) and really pulled everything off.  Mary Martinez knows how to rock an industry event, that’s for sure.  One thing that was commented on a couple times is that we typically don’t bring any of the sales team to these events, choosing to staff the booth with members of our field enablement team.  These guys are incredible, able to talk solutions, business value, partnerships, channels or tech with equal ease.  Jae Ellers and Spencer Critchlow both presented breakout sessions on our recently announced VDI solutions (FastPath and AlwaysOn), Steven Bryen and Grant Bailey presented on topics including vCloud Director and GRC solutions and Aaron Delp walked customer after customer through the Vblock components and options.  I think the highlight of the week had to be having a customer ask about the process by which customers upgraded from UIM2.1 to the (almost) newly released UIM3.0.  Rather that pull out a demo video or a presentation, Tom Chatham brought in a member of the EMC Ionix team for support and proceeded to upgrade the live Vblock that was in the booth supporting all of the demos, on the fly and without affecting any of the running workloads.  We showed off the new vCloud Director integration as well as the new elastic provisioning live and without a net.  It was one of the most ballsy things I’ve seen done at a trade show, because if it hadn’t worked like we said it would, the booth would have been down and everyone would have known about it!  Kudos to Tom for knowing that product in and out and being able to pull it off.  I know I haven’t named all of the vArchitects who helped make this event awesome, but their efforts were all stellar.

The relatively quick turnaround between the two VMworld events really prevented there from being any blockbuster announcements, but it was still a great event to meet new people and catch up with old friends.  To everyone I met in the booth, shared a meal or raised a glass with, thank you for a wonderful week.  Until next time!

The conversation was around whether the storage workload profile of an IaaS offering would differ from a normal virtualized, enterprise workload, and if so how, how could an SP leverage FAST and FAST Cache to the best effect? EMC has some great general design guidelines for these features, and there have been some great posts on the interwebs, but to my knowledge there hasn’t been anything specifically targeted at Service Providers. Since, in my experience, the workload profile is significantly different in an IaaS environment I thought it might be a good idea to collect some data and write down my thoughts.  We’ll do FAST Cache in this post and FAST VP in a subsequent one.

To be clear, I’m not your EMC TC and none of these opinions or observations are endorsed by EMC or VCE. They are my opinions only and your mileage may vary! I’m going to make some generalizations based on my experience and what I’ve seen, but I understand that there are always going to be exceptions to any rule. If you want to discuss your particular configuration or I/O pattern, please throw something in the comments and I’ll do what I can to get the right resources engaged for you.

First, let’s do a quick recap of the two technologies that we are talking about here for those of you who aren’t familiar with them. VNX FAST VP is a policy-based auto-tiering solution. The goal of FAST VP is to efficiently utilize storage tiers is to lower the overall cost of the storage solution by moving “slices” of colder data to high-capacity disks and to increase performance by keeping hotter slices of data on performance drives. In an IaaS environment, FAST VP is a way for the provider to offer a blended storage offering, reducing the cost of a traditional single-type offering while allowing for a wider range of customer-use cases and accommodating a larger cross-section of VMs with different performance characteristics.

FAST Cache is supported by all 300- and 700-series Vblock platforms, and is designed to extend the VNX array’s read-write cache and ensure that unpredictable I/O spikes that would normally result in cache misses can be serviced at EFD speeds.  FAST Cache mitigates the effects of these I/O patterns by extending the DRAM cache for both reads AND writes, dramatically reducing the overall number of dirty pages and cache misses.

Now that we know the tools we are working with, let’s look at the I/O patterns that are found most often in an IaaS environment.  The basic challenge is that while it is difficult (impossible?) to predict the types of workloads that are going to be running against the array when you open it up to a public audience, it’s also a business model that doesn’t easily support over-building to provide buffer space.  If you contract pools of CPU, RAM and disk to customers for them to partition into VMs as their business requires, you are going to see workloads all over the map.  Especially in a cloud environment (private cloud?) where you are hosting production servers, you may have write-heavy databases next to read-heavy file servers next to RAM-hungry Exchange servers next to AD servers doing almost nothing.  The architecture between the array and the VMs can also complicate the issue: multiple VMs running multiple applications/workloads, on multiple VMFS datastores spread across multiple hosts can generate a very random I/O pattern, placing stress on both the storage processors as well as on the DRAM-based cache.

FAST Cache is essentially a no-brainer here, and the IaaS use-case is one that sees an almost immediate benefit from it.  In our (non-VCE affiliated) design document for vCloud Director on Vblock we actually called for doubling the amount of FAST Cache that is normally recommended by EMC on the VNX platforms, and there was a good bit of conversation around simply recommending the maximum amount the systems would take.  There are a number of reasons for this:

1. As discussed earlier, the variability of the workload pattern requires a “buffer” of some sort to account for the spikes generated by customers on both the read and write side.
2. Despite the impressive $ per I/O numbers that today’s generation of EFDs show, most every SP I talk to struggles to find out how to work the cost into the overall business model.  The truth is that when given the option of SATA, SAS and EFD to support their workloads in an IaaS environment, customers will gravitate towards the bottom two tiers regardless of the cost.  FAST Cache gives the SP the ability to market EFD speeds to their customers for the most frequently accessed data without requiring the customer to explicitly commit to the cost of an EFD tier.
3. By providing read and write cache SPs have the option of extending out their existing IaaS infrastructure to support additional lines of business.  You don’t need to have multiple arrays to handle your different offerings if your primary array can handle multiple types of workloads, and this lowers the cost of entry and initial capital outlay of those offerings.

The general rule of thumb is to start with 5% of the total capacity as FAST Cache, and make sure to plan out your disk layout to ultimately support as much as the array can handle.  For the VNX 7500 that lives in the Vblock 300GX, that’s a whopping 2.1Tb of cache spread out over 20 200GB EFDs so it’s important to account for those disks during the design phase.  For IaaS workloads, I’m recommending increasing that to 10%-12% of the usable capacity of the array due to the nature of the workload as well as the average I/O footprint that we see.  Again, every environment can be different, so LISTEN TO YOUR TCs! These are general guidelines, and it may make sense for your ratio to go up or down based on how your customers are using the platform!

In fact (and this probably won’t make the sales guys at VCE happy) I’d prioritize FAST Cache over having an EFD tier in your array for almost ALL customers, but especially for service providers.  We’ll talk about tiering in the next post, but even if you wanted to include an EFD tier for your offering the amount that needs to be installed in order to make it viable and useful to customers is fairly low.  In my opinion, FAST Cache is the single most important thing to include in your design to extend capacity, protect the tenants and create flexibility in the platform.

Hopefully this has been helpful, and I’m interested to hear your thoughts in the comments below.  As always, professional disclosure and common decency is appreciated!  In my next post we’ll talk about storage tiering and how that can help differentiate a service provider’s offering and make the cost of high performance disk more palatable to customer.

In late September, after the acquisition of Peak 10 by Welsh Carson was announced, I started looking at other opportunities in the market.  It was becoming obvious that my desire to continue innovating on the services side wasn’t going to mesh well with the new outlook and personality of my employer, but my time there had exposed me to a ton of great people and there were opportunities out there.

As I was discussing opportunities with various people, one of the things that I brought up regularly was the blog.  I didn’t want to end up in another place where something that I loved doing conflicted with my employer.  There were companies I interviewed with where the blog was a take it or leave it kind of thing, and I could see that some of them had no idea what I was talking about.  There was one interview, however, where the subject of the blog was actually brought up as part of why they were interested in having me join the team, and that was VCE.  Jonathan Donaldson was very straight forward that I was not only allowed to continue the blog, but that I was encouraged to use it however I saw fit to interact with the community at large.  From day one, VCE, and to an even greater extent our parent company EMC, has given me more access, more encouragement and more support than I ever expected.  They have always allowed me to be as independent as I wanted to be, and even when I’ve crossed the line Jonathan has been there to watch my back.

So with that, September is the first month where I’ll have over 2,500 unique visitors combining for more than 4,000 pageviews.

Both of those numbers have climbed steadily over the last year, and I’m very grateful for your continued participation, and very excited to see that people are getting value out of the content.  I’ve posted 44 articles (43 of which are still available…) over that time, averaging around a post a week, which is much closer to where I want to be.  With luck, I intend to keep this level of output (or slightly higher, if possible) for the foreseeable future.

Big picture, I have a long way to go, a lot of work to do and much to learn.

4,000 pageviews a month is impressive to little ‘ol me, but there are a lot of bloggers out there that I respect a lot who dwarf that number.  I have to keep working, I have to keep learning, I have to keep finding ways to get to the truth of things and find ways to provide value to all of you readers.  Luckily, there are a good group of people out there who have been very willing to spend their time and experience with me.  While the whole list is too long to name, Chad Sakac, Tommy Trogden and Chuck Hollis are three who have gone above and beyond for me.  Tommy is my partner in crime, and he proof-reads and gut-checks almost everything that I write.  I’m amazed at the amount of enthusiasm he brings to the table.  Chuck has invested a fair amount of time and attention to helping me on the strategic side of the blog.  I’m (slowly) learning how to play in the sandbox with the other kids (especially the competitive ones) and how to stay on message.  Chuck has forgotten more about blogging and social media in general than I’ll ever know, and I’m lucky to have him as a resources to lean on.  Chad was the person who suggested I start blogging in the first place in the run up to our Vblock POC at Peak 10, so for better or for worse, this is all Chad’s fault.  He’s also incredibly generous with what little time he has to give, and when I’d gotten into some hot water because of a blog post I’d written he was the first (and only) one to leave me a voice message telling me it was going to be alright, that everyone gets called into the principal’s office sooner or later.  Gentlemen, thank you for all you’ve given me.  If’ I’m getting any better at this over time it’s you three who deserve the most credit.

I have no idea where this blog will end up.  I’m toying with the idea of starting a second blog just for my personal use, as sometimes the fairly narrow focus of this forum doesn’t let me run with all of the ideas that I have in my head.  I’d like to find a way to generate more discussion on the site, since I typically don’t see a lot of commentary or discussion on most posts.  What I do know is that it’s become a very important part of my professional life, and as long as there are people who enjoy reading it, I’ll keep writing it.  Thank you all, this has been a lot of fun and there’s definitely more (and hopefully better) to come!