Every Friday we like to highlight some of our favorite posts on IT Operations, Cloud Computing, DevOps, Virtualization and anything else that grabbed our attention over the week. Here are some great articles from the week of May 21st that are worth taking a look at. Enjoy and have a fantastic weekend!

Amazon CTO, Werner Vogels, Explains How it Built its Cloud Business into the Best in the Industry by Julie Bort

Werner Vogels is Amazon’s CTO and a chief architect of its cloud. He is also one of most innovative people in the tech industry. He keeps Amazon Web Services (AWS) two steps ahead of the competition, even as countless new clouds come online to compete.

Future of open source survey highlights progress, changes, challenges by Jay Lyman

451 Research was pleased to collaborate on the Future of Open Source Survey 2012 with North Bridge Venture Partners and Black Duck Software. This year’s survey garnered 740 responses from a variety of vendors and non-vendors in the industry. Overall, the survey highlighted some subtle and sometimes dramatic changes in what is driving open source software. It also made clear that while there is still a good degree of education and awareness yet to occur around open source software, there is a large amount of open source code making its way into today’s enterprise, webscale, consumer and other computing environments.

IT Outsourcing: Will CIOs Reclaim Their Power? by Stephanie Overby

Independent cloud-based IT service management tools could enable CIOs to wrestle back control of IT once and for all, argues A.T. Kearney’s Arjun Sethi.

Red Hat could cash in with open-source cloud juggling act by Matt Asay

Open … and Shut The good open source lord giveth, and it taketh away, and no one knows this better than Red Hat. As Red Hat chief executive Jim Whitehurst declared at this week’s Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco, California, open source and its children – including cloud computing – are laying waste to the economics of how traditional enterprises do business, forcing them to gravitate to information to compete. Red Hat’s role in this tectonic shift? Arms dealer.

Every cloud needs an SOA lining: analyst by Joe McKendrick

Silos are springing up everywhere again. SOA has matured to the point where it provides a shovel-ready implementation blueprint for cloud computing projects.

CloudStack, OpenStack lure supporters, one by one by Brandon Butler

In the less than two months since Citrix gave its CloudStack software an Apache license, cloud providers are beginning to support the open source model.

What’s Cloud Management? by Ofir Nachmani

This last year has been immensely interesting for me as I watched the shaky cloud market mature. The change in people’s state of mind was rapid. The discussion advanced quickly from “the cloud will not prosper” to “Can we trust its security?”…As companies adopt the cloud, they find themselves really struggling to reap its benefits. Inevitably, for some, the extent of their disappointment will be matched only by the extent of their expectations.

NASA backs off OpenStack development by Barb Darrow

NASA, which along with Rackspace was one of two original backers of the OpenStack project, will stop developing software for the open-source cloud platform.

SAP to Acquire Ariba for $4.3 Billion in Push Into Cloud by Kenneth Wong & Dina Bass

SAP, the largest maker of enterprise- applications software, agreed to buy Ariba Inc. for $4.3 billion in the German company’s second multi-billion purchase in cloud computing to take on Oracle Corp. SAP will pay $45 a share, or 20 percent more than Ariba’s May 21 closing price, Walldorf, Germany-based SAP said yesterday. The transaction, subject to approval by Ariba shareholders and regulators, will probably be completed by the end of August, SAP Chief Financial Officer Werner Brandt said on a conference call.

Six Degrees acquires Datahop; fiberoptic datacenter network by Andrew Nusca

UK cloud services provider Six Degrees Group acquires Datahop, giving it a high-speed fiberoptic network connecting datacenters in London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Paris.

Interest in Cloud Computing Has Peaked by Reuven Cohen

Lately I’ve been hearing some rumblings during my various discussions around cloud computing. Some in the industry have been quietly saying the end is near for the much over hyped term.  I wouldn’t go as far as to say the cloud is dead just yet, but there is a growing sense that  interest in cloud computing, at least from the point of view of a buzz word, has peaked.

Preventing A Cloud Outage by Rick Blaisdell

What are the most common cloud outages and how to prevent them? A service disruption is a technical perfect storm. Initial mistakes made by engineers can cause the appearance of several other bugs and glitches.

A few more noteworthy pieces…

• High Scalability – Pinterest Architecture Update – 18 Million Visitors, 10x Growth,12 Employees, 410 TB of Data by Todd Hoff
• Intel debuts cloud-based password management service, battles Symantec by Antone Gonsalves
• Survey: 99% rate Security is a major consideration when choosing the Cloud by Brian Pennington
• What is cloud hosting? [Video] by Cloud Host Guide
• Top 10 Myths About IPv6 by ITBusinessEdge

Sometimes the simplest questions can invoke the most thought. Recently, I asked an impressive group of industry experts (aka Zenoss developers) a seemingly simple question – what is an event?

It might not surprise you that I got quite a few different answers. Really, how hard can it be (asks this marketing guy)? These geeks have spent years buried in code that translates and interprets events. Seriously, they have built a system that is capable of managing over 100 million events a day! Yes, that’s correct, 100 million events (I say, with my pinky extended into the corner of my mouth, reminiscent of Dr. Evil).

After some discussion, the overall consensus became pretty clear – an event is a change in status. Ok, so that would satisfy Wiki or Webster, but what about our users? When we say that we help them manage events, what do we mean? Well, this took a bit more noodling.

“A change in status”

Yes, in order to help our users manage their infrastructure, we have to collect a lot of changes in status.In fact, we have to collect just about every change in status for just about everything in their environment (Como se dice, Unified Monitoring). And that’s where the 100 million plus events come in. Ok, collecting millions of events is cool, but is that really helping anyone? Are they using Zenoss, because they can collect about a billion events a week? No, they use us because plain and simple, we can sort out events that matter to them.

We parse through literally everything that’s going on in their respective infrastructure, and identify the few events that are important to them. This is where a lot the work that our developers do is focused. We do a great job eliminating event storms, and doing nifty stuffs like root cause analysis; our users don’t have to worry about millions of events. In fact (and few actually believe this, until they see it), we can identify and prioritize the one event that is the likely cause of a major outage. That’s pretty cool. So, Zenoss helps users by identifying “ significant changes in status.” Needless to say, we’ve spent a lot of time defining what significant is.

“A significant change in status”

Still, that doesn’t seem to tell the whole story. Because we talk lot about Service Assurance and Service-Orientation, that still has to be part of the definition. Actually, speaking with our developers, this service stuff is what’s keeping many of them up at night. Identifying a significant event for an element isn’t rocket science. Anyone can set a notification threshold to critical if a server’s CPU utilization reaches 90%. But what is 90% utilization, for a service? Admittedly, that might not be so hard if all of the elements in said service (eg. Blades, storage, network gear, etc.) were 100% dedicated. However, it gets foggier when some are shared; it gets really hairy when those elements move around a lot (thanks vMotion). Since our developers spend so much time on it – and since our customers seem to value it so much – the addition of service is needed for this definition.

“A significant change in status of a service”

But wait, while IT services are king, nuts & bolts elemental monitoring still hasn’t gone away. At the end of the day, when a service has a problem, users will inevitably have to drill down to its component elements. I guess we have to throw that aspect in too. This seemingly basic question was a lot more complicated, than I had imagined.

Ok, so here’s the result…. Drumroll, please… an event is….

“A significant change in status of an element or service”

Now, this doesn’t include Zenoss events that incorporate BBQ and speedboats; that’s a whole different type of event.

What are your thoughts on this? How do you define an event in your environment?

In my previous blog posts, I described how IT Operations is increasingly being asked for Operational Intelligence (Analytics) to both justify its existence and to be more efficient (eg. Capacity planning). We speak with a lot of IT Ops professionals and many of them say that they will likely work with their BI (Business Intelligence) teams in order to address their future analytics needs. I’ve developed a great deal of respect in working with both BI and IT Ops teams over the past couple decades; but I think the idea of BI teams owning analytics for IT Ops is a very bad one. While I’d have no problem with them dating one-another, I do not think they should marry! Frankly, I think such a marriage would be a miserable one with both sides desperately wanting a divorce. Here are five reasons why that marriage is doomed:

Reason #1 – BI’s numbers are more important than yours

While a case can be made that your real time operational data (eg. Current Status of a service) is as important as the numbers that those BI guys crunch, your Operational Intelligence (OI) analytics will never be as important as theirs. You’re looking at analytics to report status to management and increase efficiency; they’re looking at analytics to ensure that they can make payroll.  This is why their warehouse has been deployed since it was a physical warehouse, while your analytics project is still getting pushed back on your to-do list.  When trying to get those BI guys to do something for you, you’ll always be treated like a second-class citizen. You will always have to “take a number”, getting accustomed to just about every other group’s analytics needs trumping yours.

Reason #2 – BI’s numbers are more expensive than yours

Because of #1, those BI guys have invested a heck of a lot of cash and sweat in their systems. How much do you think they’ve invested in that TIBCO-Hyperion-Informatica-etc. solution they’ve built? Think for a second, how much will your additional data & processing overhead add to the cost of that mission-critical, clustered, three-site replicated behemoth? As I doubt those guys are sitting around at 50% utilization, your needs are probably going to require them to grow their footprint. Quick, where do you think that budget will come from? I’ll bet that firing up your own analytics system will cost half… no, 1/10th of what additional capacity on theirs will cost.

Reason #3 – Operational vs. Business “E’s” and “L’s”

Business Intelligence guys think in terms of Extraction, Transformation, and Loading (ETL). While some of them do work on Data Integration projects that require near-real time communications across disparate systems, you’ll likely be crunching numbers from their warehouse – and that warehouse is mostly fed by periodic (eg. Nightly) batch updates. The BI guys are mostly concerned with business questions like how much money did we make across all of our locations yesterday. Whereas you’ll be concerned with things like how does the increase in email users, at 9:05am on Mondays, impact our MS Exchange/MS AD/Cisco Switches/etc. So, they’ll likely be resistant to extracting your stuff, at the frequency you need it. If you want to load the volume of data that you really need into their extremely expensive warehouse, it will cost you dearly. And yes, they may stand-up a dedicated warehouse just to suit your needs. But if it’s anything like the one they already use and are familiar with, it will cost more than you can afford.  So you can choose between having too little data, and having dramatically overpriced data.

Reason # 4 – You really should own the “T”

How many days of endless WebEx and face-to-face meetings do you think it will take to get those BI guys to build that SLA Attainment Projection Analysis, just the way you want it? Extraction and Transformation are tough because they’re technically challenging. Transformation is tough because of the human overhead. I’m not saying those BI guys aren’t smart, but how much time do you want to invest in translating your operational needs?  Don’t let anyone fool you, it will take a while for one of your operators to get up to speed on transforming your mountain of data into operational intelligence. However, having a user who understands both the reporting system and the business is invaluable. Really, it’s worth investing in this expertise in-house.

Reason #5 – Use your Intelligence, Operationally

How cool would it be to have both tactical and strategic reporting, on the same system? Shipping your Operational Intelligence load off to those BI guys will inevitably lead to your team working with two sets of books. By keeping the entire system integrated, your team will all be on the same page. You’ll be able to better map day-to-day operations, against long-term objectives. You’ll be more responsive, as your operators will have insight into current and historical performance, at-a-glance. You’ll be free to do more than just report numbers and be able to proactively avoid issues, using historical performance and health data.

Imagine a world where your OI system could actually help you to proactively avoid outages by correlating performance & health with usage trends?  If the end-game for your IT Operations Analytics initiative is just about justification (eg. You want to produce pretty graphs for management meetings), any old analytics package might do. But, if you want your frontline IT Ops staff to actually benefit from all that data, you need to ensure that it’s integrated with your operational monitoring system. It will have to be owned by IT Ops.

Just do it, yourself.

Could those BI guys do a good job of building you an OI system – yes! But:

1. Maintaining it will never be a priority, for them.
2. It will be overbuilt, costing you too much of money.
3. It won’t contain the amount & type of data that you really need for operations.
4. You won’t have the amount of control over it that you should.
5. And it won’t help you with day-to-day operations.

Wrapping things up, it makes more sense to buy/borrow a head or two from the BI team, and have them build the OI system for you. But make sure that it’s your system, and that it meets your needs. Furthering that idea still, buy a monitoring platform that includes OI capabilities – and by OI capabilities, I mean a serious warehouse & great Transformation tools. In doing that, you won’t have to worry about those pesky “E’s” and “L’s” and your operators will be able to do a better job with #5 (using the intelligence operationally). Most importantly, you’ll be better off keeping OI in-house either way.

Who knows, maybe someday these teams will be ready to tie the knot, but until then, keep working together to build a strong level of trust and never stop communicating.

Every Friday we like to highlight some of our favorite posts on IT Operations, Cloud Computing, DevOps, Virtualization and anything else that grabbed our attention over the week. Here are some great articles from the week of May 7th that are worth taking a look at. Enjoy and have a fantastic weekend!

Openness is Winning in the Cloud by Libby Clark

As part of our ongoing focus on open source cloud, we talked with Mickos about Linux and the open cloud, the role of APIs and where open source cloud computing is headed. The interview is presented in two parts. In part two we discuss Eucalyptus’s business in more detail.

Open source cloud project backers duking it out for support by Brandon Butler

As open source cloud communities continue to mature, some say they are still far behind proprietary offerings. In the less than two months since Citrix gave its CloudStack software an Apache license, cloud providers are beginning to support the open source model.

Oracle Embraces Cloud Computing, the New Consumption Model by Liam Lahey

The clouds have lifted at Oracle, one might say. In a series of briefings at the recent Oracle Industry Analyst World 2012, the software vendor set its sights on the cloud computing market, announcing a broad portfolio of products and services to enable public, private and hybrid clouds, in turn letting customers choose the right approach for them.

SpaceOps: How NASA Uses Agile Development in the Search for Life on Mars by Klint Finley

A forthcoming case study from Atlassian looks at Ensemble, a project jointly developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, CA and the Ames Research Center near San Francisco. It’s described by the space agency as: “a platform for the development, integration, and deployment of mission operations software that can be reconfigured or upgraded as required during the course of a mission.” In other words, it’s an agile software platform for rocket scientists.

How CIOs Migrate Their IT Applications to the Cloud by David Deans

As the role of cloud computing is growing around the globe, many CIOs and other senior IT decision makers are facing challenges with their existing network infrastructure — to support the migration of their business applications to the cloud. A new international study by Cisco Systems revealed the ongoing challenges associated with public or private cloud deployments.

Red Hat hits 10-year, $1bn Enterprise Linux birthday by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Making a Linux distribution is easy, and lots of people have done it and continue to do it. All you have to do is get the source code and integrate the pieces you like and slap your logo on it. Making a commercial Linux distribution that makes enough money to cultivate innovation and stability in the kernel is not so easy, however. Very few companies have done it, but Red Hat is one of them – and its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) marks its 10th birthday today.

The CIO’s Critical Shift: This Might Hurt by Adrian Bridgwater

Talk of so-called “sea change developments” and “paradigm shifts” has long been rife among the IT media and the web’s wider technology commentary channels.

3 winners, 3 losers in the move to big data by David Linthicum

The move to big data is afoot. Recently, Yahoo and Google both tossed their very big hats into the ring, and the cloud computing leaders are already offering access to big data services. It’s becoming the killer application for cloud computing, and I believe it will drive a tremendous amount of growth in 2012 and 2013.

Assessing OpenStack, CloudStack And Amazon Web Services: An Interview With Floyd Strimling Of Zenoss by Arnal Dayaratna

…OpenStack is tremendously promising but faces multiple challenges in the form of competition from CloudStack, the “staggering” rate of innovation of Amazon Web Services, the danger of Android-like fragmentation within the OpenStack community, and the technical challenge of delivering a “stable, flexible, and useable release that is ready for production deployments.

A few more noteworthy posts…

• 2012 Cisco Survey Tracks Top Cloud Concerns [Infographic] by Lora O’Haver
• Big Data Architecture at LinkedIn [Video Interview] by Michael Floyd
• Top 10 Cloud Influencers, Thought Leaders by Mike Ellis
• HP Cloud Now Available In Beta – A First Look by Chris Evans
• Nicira Virtualizes The Network For Offshore Cloud Specialist Calligo by CloudTweaks
• Terremark Expands Cloud to Denver by Rich Miller

Every Friday we like to highlight some of our favorite posts on IT Operations, Cloud Computing, DevOps, Virtualization and anything else that grabbed our attention over the week. Here are some great articles from the week of May 7th that are worth taking a look at. Enjoy and have a fantastic weekend!

Study: Cloud Computing Cuts $5.5 Billion Annually from Federal Budget by Patrick Burke

The federal government saved nearly $5.5 billion a year by moving to cloud services. But it might have saved up to $12 billion if cloud strategies were more aggressive, a survey of federal IT managers found.

Citrix’s Project Avalon Delivers Windows via the Cloud by Mike Barton

Among the number of announcements under its “path to the cloud” banner at its Synergy show, Citrix Systems has launched Project Avalon, which it says “enables enterprises to transform some of their most important workloads, Windows desktop and Windows applications, to run on cloud infrastructure.”

Lessons from Citrix Synergy: OpenStack vs. CloudStack  by Floyd Strimling

This past week I had the privilege of attending Citrix Synergy 2012 in San Francisco California.  My intent was to explore Citrix’s strategy of mobile and cloud-based solutions while presenting the case for cloud monitoring at CloudStack’s Build a Cloud Day.  This was my first Synergy, and while I had relatively low expectations, I was excited by Citrix’s vision, solutions, and roadmap.

Red Hat Reveals Plans for Hybrid Enterprise PaaS With OpenShift by Chris Preimesberger

Open-source enterprise software provider Red Hat on May 9 revealed a strategy for offering its OpenShift platform as a service (PaaS) cloud operating system, which is aimed at becoming an alternative to current industry market-share leaders, such as VMware’s vSphere, Microsoft Azure and NASA/Rackspace’s OpenStack.

If a tree falls in your network, does anybody hear? by Kevin Nikkhoo

If you claim that the cloud is too risky, then one also must equally consider that adequate security of an existing on-premise  network, or lack thereof, could also be a root cause. If lack of compliance is the issue, then do some more homework…compliance in the cloud is real.

Open-source cloud frameworks: A work in progress by Robert L. Scheier

When IT consultancy OpenCredo set out to launch three new applications within seven months for a major insurance underwriter, it had three goals in mind: Trim development time from the usual years-long pace, allow for frequent changes from the client, and build a system that can handle unpredictable traffic spikes.

Going native: The move to bare-metal cloud services by David Linthicum

Removing the virtualization layer provides access to the power and performance that many cloud computing consumers seek.

Defining ‘big data’ depends on who’s doing the defining by Brandon Butler

Big data is an IT buzzword nowadays, but what does it really mean? When does data become big? At a recent Big Data and High Performance Computing Summit in Boston hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS), data scientist John Rauser mentioned a simple definition: Any amount of data that’s too big to be handled by one computer.

HP opens up public cloud to public beta by Timothy Prickett Morgan

As El Reg told you it would a month ago, Hewlett-Packard today has opened up its HP Cloud Services public cloud – aka HP Cloud because by definition a cloud is a service, right? – for a full-on beta onslaught from John Q Public.

Piston Cloud, the Red Hat of OpenStack Cloud Computing? by Libby Clark

With the recent buzz around the OpenStack project, momentum behind open source cloud development is building. We’re now seeing an early ecosystem of companies and products built around OpenStack – a goal that Rackspace’s Lew Moorman laid out for the project when it launched two years ago.

Amazon and SAP put All-in-One in the cloud by Barb Darrow

SAP All-in-One applications will soon run in Amazon’s cloud. That could make Amazon EC2 more attractive to companies that worry about offloading crucial business applications from their own data centers.  SAP BusinessObjects analytics and Rapid Deployment solutions already run on Amazon — as do most of Oracle’s business applications.

This just in: Cloud computing is hard and takes a long time by David Linthicum

Cisco Systems has surveyed more than 1,300 IT professionals to determine the top priorities and challenges they face when migrating applications and information to the cloud. Guess what? It’s harder, and it takes longer than many thought.

A few more worth a look…

• 6 Signs of a Maturing Cloud-Computing Industry by Todd Nielsen
• Top 50 Open Source Companies: Where Are They Now? by The VAR Guy
• Four Reasons Why I Hate the Term ‘Cloud’ by Chris Dotson
• Google puts a price tag on Cloud SQL services by Barb Darrow
• Cloud data fiasco forces bosses to break out the whiteboards by Gavin Clarke
• Amazon announces cloud expo this November in Las Vegas by Rachel King

This past week, I had the privilege of attending Citrix Synergy 2012 in San Francisco, California.  My intent was to explore Citrix’s strategy of mobile and cloud-based solutions while presenting the case for cloud monitoring at CloudStack’s Build a Cloud Day.  This was my first Synergy, and while I had relatively low expectations, I was excited by Citrix’s vision, solutions, and roadmap.

Synergy cleared-up one of my biggest questions for CloudStack; what is the commercial strategy?  Mark Templeton, Citrix CEO, wasted no time in Wednesday’s keynote to announce Citrix CloudPlatform powered by Apache CloudStack.  Clearly Citrix has learned from their past dealings within open source, and they are now orchestrating, pun intended, a masterful open source and commercial strategy.

Inevitably, each time I discussed CloudStack, the topic of OpenStack reared its head.  It’s simply impossible to escape the hype of OpenStack powered by some of the largest entities in the world; namely, Rackspace, NASA, Dell, HP, IBM, Red Hat, and more.   However, OpenStack and their commercializers should take note of what’s going on at Citrix.

While OpenStack is a wonderful collection of projects (no one can deny the greatness of Swift), it also has a wide range of maturity concerns.  In fact, many conversations centered on the reported development efforts at both Rackspace and HP needed to get OpenStack into production.  Large service providers and cloud providers may have the resources needed to develop, maintain, and extend an OpenStack deployment, but what about the rest of us? Most worrisome may be the notion of OpenStack fragmentation or forks that are necessary for these providers to differentiate themselves from each other. Furthermore, the confusion around what OpenStack is and what it does was palpable.

Meanwhile, CloudStack, by its very nature, is a bit more mature than OpenStack.  Look no further than customers like Edmunds, Datapipe, and Zynga to legitimize this claim. These are real customers generating real revenue or other benefits using CloudStack in deployment.  Additionally, within the last month or so, CloudStack is building an impressive ASF ecosystem.

In the end, it will come down to the OpenStack Foundation vs. Apache Software Foundation and OpenStack’s Commercializers vs. Citrix.  From the friendly confines of the open source world, OpenStack and CloudStack certainly will be able to get-a-long and collaborate.  However, the same cannot be said about Citrix who will need to aggressively market and defend CloudPlatform against OpenStack powered deployments.

OpenStack has done a wonderful job of promoting themselves as the most important open source project of our generation.  On the other hand, Citrix is in an enviable position of a cohesive commercial solution and strategy that is in place and available today.

Although Citrix is careful not to engage in a war with OpenStack, clearly these two projects are vying for the same market and customers.  Tell me what you think. Who’s your money on?  Can two survive?  I’ll tell you if you tell me!

Zenoss is at Citrix Synergy this week in San Francisco. In conjunction with our presence at the event and session during the Build a Cloud Workshop, we’re happy to announce an update to our CloudStack monitoring ZenPack.

Available immediately on GitHub as part of our Open Source ZenPack portfolio, these enhancements will extend monitoring and correlation capabilities to VMs running on CloudStack for a more unified view of the CloudStack infrastructure. More specifically, the new CloudStack ZenPack now monitors a broader range of VM’s, including router VMs, secondary storage VMs and console proxy VMs, to ensure service performance on CloudStack.

While at Citrix Synergy this week, stop by booth #906 in the CloudStack Community Pavilion to learn more about the CloudStack ZenPack. And on Thursday, we’ll be presenting at the Build a Cloud workshop, which is a great opportunity to learn best practices and gain industry insights into building elastic, scalable and profitable open source clouds.

We originally launched this ZenPack last fall and with good reason. Citrix has been doing great things to promote open source and interoperable Cloud computing. As evidence by their activity within the OpenStack community (even before entrusting CloudStack’s future to the Apache Foundation), Citrix is moving in the right direction by letting CloudStack live as a full open source project. Not to mention that they are the first Cloud platform in the industry to do so.

Our own Floyd Strimling has pointed out, Citrix has maintained a truly heterogeneous offering supporting the likes of VMware, Microsoft, Xen, and more.  Additionally, Citrix has maintained an aggressive roadmap while releasing stable and mature code to both their community and commercial customers.

According to Chet Luther, Principal Engineer and Architect of the CloudStack ZenPack, Citrix makes their CloudStack mission clear: deliver a powerful, proven, hypervisor-agnostic platform that helps customers of all sizes build robust Clouds. Zenoss aims to support this mission by working with our commercial and open source customers to continue enhancing our CloudStack ZenPack and providing a powerful unified monitoring solution for CloudStack deployments.

Having recently perused a few trade shows and viewed lots of industry resources, there’s a lot of discussion around analytics. Looking at some IT Operations system demos, there are quite a few slick interfaces with some eye-popping reports. Really, it would seem from viewing these that an IT Ops professional could produce advanced reports for just about anything they’d need. Yet many of these systems store all of this data, and do all of the transformations and queries, without a separate data warehouse? So, why would anyone require a data warehouse, for IT Operations?

IT Operations has grown to a level of maturity, that analytics are becoming the norm. But I won’t go onto detail on that, as I’ve recently written an analytics blog post that covers it. What I do want to explore is why one would want to do those analytics on a data warehouse vs. the transactional system. For the record, Zenoss Service Dynamics does incorporate an IT Operations Data Warehouse. With that in mind, Data Warehouses make sense, for the following reasons:

1. Scalability – Offload server & I/O bound tasks associated with querying and reporting on servers & I/O not used by the transaction processing systems. In other words, let your IT Ops monitoring system do its job, without getting bogged down by resource-intensive analytics stuff.
2. Performance – Data models that are ideal for querying and reporting are not appropriate for transaction processing. By splitting this function, you get faster individual analytics & transaction systems, vs. a slow generic system that covers both functions.
3. More Data – To store data from a longer span of time than can efficiently be held in a transaction processing system. How long should IT Ops transactional systems store their data, especially if they’re doing real or near real time polling? The reality is, without a data warehouse, most IT Ops monitoring systems must purge this data regularly, for performance reasons.
4. Standardization – To provide a repository of normalized transaction data that can be reported against, without modifying the transaction processing systems

There are certainly other primers, but these may be the ones that are most significant for IT Operations. Numbers 1-3 are significant for any IT Ops system that attempts to perform analytics in their transactional systems. By adding the analytics overhead to their transactional systems, they’ll adversely impact performance and their ability to scale. And, too be effective, they’ll really have to limit the data stored. So, what’s the point? If we look at the industry now, we have a couple approaches to dealing with lots of data:

• No Data Warehouse – These vendors crunch their snazzy reports and analytics, on the transactional systems. This impacts scale and performance heavily, and will lead to organizations having to choose between effective monitoring, and good analytics. Really, it’s a dead-end game. As analytics requirements grow (eg. capacity planning, tracking SLAs, etc.), they will eventually need a warehouse. But organizations will be so invested in customized reports & such for these systems that the transition will be extremely painful.
• 3rd Party IT Ops Data Warehouse – Whether by buying one off the shelf, or by building their own, organizations can bolt a 3rd party warehouse on their IT Ops system. The standardization & normalization of data (eg. ETL) for these implementations is usually painful, and they’re hard to maintain. Though some “frameworks” promote these integrated capabilities, they are really 3rd party solutions that have been bolted on, through acquisition.

Some still see an IT Ops data warehouse as overkill, but I personally see it as overdue. It frees up the transactional side of the platform to scale to just about any infrastructure, while allowing the analytics side to do what it does best. As organizations stretch their transactional systems to deliver advanced reporting and even rudimentary analytics, they’ll eventually run into walls requiring them to bolt on a warehouse, anyhow.

Like it or not, analytics is coming to IT Ops, and it will inevitably drag its warehouse along for the ride.

Every Friday we like to highlight some of our favorite posts on IT Operations, Cloud Computing, DevOps, Virtualization and anything else that grabbed our attention over the week. Here are some great articles from the week of April 30th that are worth taking a look at. Enjoy and have a fantastic weekend!

Cloud & the evolution of the enterprise architect by James Urquhart

Enterprise architects have been a staple of corporate IT departments for well over a decade now, starting in earnest with the advent of service-oriented architecture and corporate data modeling. The need for enterprise architecture was spurred by the need to gain control over an increasingly complex computing environment, and an increasingly large backlog of data and feature needs. But those needs are changing, and so is the job of the enterprise architect.

To win with cloud computing, change IT first by David Linthicum

Most organizations consider the move to cloud-based platforms as simple additions to the existing portfolio of IT systems. However, if internal IT does not change around the usage of most cloud services, enterprise IT won’t get the full benefits. Indeed, many initial uses of cloud computing resources in such organizations will end up in failure. The dirty little secret is that most of the change to IT needs to occur before the first implementation to make cloud computing holistically successful.

Devops Culture (Part 1) by John Willis

After the first US based Devopsdays in Mountainview 2010 Damon Edwards (@damonedwards) and I coined the acronym CAMS, which stands for Culture, Automation, Measurement and Sharing. Jez Humble (@jezhumble) later added an L, standing for Lean, to form CALMS. In this post I wanted to start with an introduction and overview of what culture might look like in the DevOps movement and identify some patterns.

VMware, Piston Cloud pledge to develop open source PaaS offering by Brandon Butler

Deal allows integration of Open Stack with Cloud Foundry to create IaaS cloud deployment model aimed at enterprise users. In a pairing of unlikely partners, Piston Cloud Computing announced it will work to support integration of VMware’s open source platform-as-a-service offering Cloud Foundry with OpenStack, the open source infrastructure-as-a-service model. In a pairing of unlikely partners, Piston Cloud Computing announced it will work to support integration of VMware’s open source platform-as-a-service offering Cloud Foundry with OpenStack, the open source infrastructure-as-a-service model.

Devs vs. Ops: Sushi vs. Meat and Potatoes by Klint Finley

One of the criticism of DevOps we hear often is that it’s too focused on getting operations to change according to what developers want than getting developers to adjust to the realities that constrain operations. For example, Circonus CEO Theo Schlossangle made this point on theCube earlier this year.

Amazon EC2 – a real-world case study of moving from a data center to the cloud by Greg Wilson

Most people exploring Amazon EC2 ask the same question I asked… “What is this really going to cost me?”. When you dig into how EC2 is priced, you’ll find that there are multiple variables, which creates a bit of uncertainty. Basically, it boils down to the server instance type, the disk space used, and the amount of data moved in and out of the instance. There are other small charges for number of I/Os and any unused IP addresses, but these are typically only a few cents and don’t have much impact on the final bill (based on my experience).

Zynga Takes On Amazon In IaaS Game by Charles Babcock

Zynga will sell cloud infrastructure-as-a-service to other game makers who want a hosting platform. With this innovative play, Zynga just became Amazon’s competitor.

IBM PureApplication Systems: It Is Not PaaS. Period. by Krishnan Subramanian

IBM Impact has been going on at Las Vegas and the buzz around the event is IBM PureSystems. I see a lot of excitement around PureSystems both from IBM side and their customer side. However, I also see some confusion around the messaging. IBM has been sending ambiguous signals around IBM PureApplication Systems which is part of the IBM PureSystem family.

Red Hat releases OpenShift source code by Sophie Curtis

Open source software distributor Red Hat has released the source code for its OpenShift platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering, allowing developers to run the platform on multiple cloud fabrics, including OpenStack.

IBM’s SugarCRM Deal Is Sweet for Open Source Software by Clint Boulton

IBM’s recent decision to replace its Oracle Siebel customer management system with SugarCRM’s web-based application is a big vote of confidence in commercial open source software.

Piston to Integrate Cloud Foundry & OpenStack by Maureen O’Gara

Clouds evidently make for strange bedfellows. Piston Cloud Computing, the start-up peddling an OpenStack distribution for enterprise private clouds, is co-operating with VMware of all people to develop a Cloud Provider Interface (CPI) that integrates OpenStack cloud infrastructure with Cloud Foundry, VMware’s open source Platform-as-a-Service.

The Fundamental Elements Of Cloud Computing Security by the Cloud Business Review Team

Cloud computing is the hot topic in the IT industry at the moment, but it is recognised that many businesses are cautious about migrating services to the cloud due to concerns over security.

A few more noteworthy posts…

• Why the new Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud Starter Edition is good news for Partners by Bill Petro
• VMware to offer enterprise application portal for BYOD by Joab Jackson
• Dexter vs Big Data by Josh Atwell
• Facebook’s Mystery Hardware Maker Lands on U.S. Shores by Cade Metz

This week, Zenoss will be sponsoring Citrix Synergy 2012 in San Francisco. Not only that, we’re leading a session at the free How to Build a Cloud Day. If you’re going to be at the show or in town, it’s a great opportunity to learn from industry experts.

Join us for free day of learning, best practices and industry insights into building elastic, scalable and profitable open source clouds. The Build a Cloud Day is a one-day event held in conjunction with Citrix Synergy 2012 in San Francisco and includes a free pass to the Synergy Keynote and Solutions Expo. This event offers a unique opportunity to learn about the cloud building as well as the challenges and successes of delivering cloud services.

• Learn how to build an open source cloud with solutions from Citrix CloudStack, Canonical, RightScale, Zenoss and Xen.org.
• Network with peers, industry experts and solution providers at the CloudStack Community Reception
• Watch the Citrix Synergy keynote where Mark Templeton, president and CEO of Citrix, and Sameer Dholakia, General Manager, will discuss Citrix’s cloud strategy and Citrix’s participation in the Apache Software Foundation.
• Eat lunch and visit the Synergy Solutions Expo and the CloudStack Community Pavilion

So what are you waiting for? Hit up the link below to RSVP and get the rest of the details.

Build a Cloud Day at Citrix Synergy, San Francisco