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Beyond EmailFor better or worse, a significant portion of business communication happens outside of the inbox and that means new systems for IT to deliver and manage.

modern infrastructure • october 2015 2

laBor day has passed, school has started and parents again get to crouch in child-sized chairs during “Meet the Teacher” nights. I don’t usually expect much from these evenings, but the other day, I found myself nodding in agreement with my daughter’s second grade teacher re-garding how she handles kids who believe they’ve learned everything there is to know about a topic.

She maintains that for kids who have mastered, say, the art of skip counting (2, 4, 6, 8 or 5, 10, 15, 20 …), it’s more valuable for them to explore it further by learning to skip count backwards or starting on an odd number, than it is to rush into a new, more advanced topic like long di-vision. “Some kids in the class may be capable of learning the process involved in doing long division, but so what? I like to challenge them to think out, not up,” she told us.

We have some nice examples of that thinking—out, not up—in this issue of Modern Infrastructure. Take data-aware storage—a topic explored by contributing writer Alan R. Earls in “Not Your Average Disk Array.” Conversations about data storage, he rightly points out, can be fairly

predictable, centering on performance and capacity. Some storage vendors are stretching the bounds of traditional storage by leaning heavily on metadata and analytics, so as to give operators much more advanced management capabilities. If all goes as planned, these storage arrays will still achieve the primary function of holding all your stuff, but they can do a whole lot more.

Then there’s email. Given its shortcomings, a lot of peo-ple like to think, the hell with it, let’s get rid of email alto-gether and just rely on new and exciting social messaging and collaboration tools. But that’s impractical for the av-erage business. In “Beyond Email,” I talk to organizations augmenting existing email systems with complimentary tools that reduce our reliance on email, but don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Contributor Bob Plankers continues with that line of thought in “Viva la Revolucion.” Ultimately, he says, IT people would do well to think out more often, and try to understand the bigger picture business goals that their IT activities are trying to support. “The gap between the rank and file of IT and the business itself must close, and the way to do that is by making sure IT staff can answer the ‘why’ of their work, not just the ‘what’ and ‘how,’” he writes. I’m sure my daughter’s teacher would agree. n

alEx BarrEtt is editor in chief of Modern Infrastructure. Contact her at [email protected].

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mailto:[email protected]

Beyond EmailThe onus is on IT to allow employees to communicate

and collaborate effectively—from anywhere.BY ALEx BArrETT


thE swollEN INBoxEs. The endless threads. The cost. The storage. The backups. Whether it’s end users or IT profes-sionals, everyone loves to hate email. Some even imagine a day when we won’t use it at all.

While the email-free workplace probably isn’t on the immediate horizon, enterprise messaging and collabo-ration have gained steam, and tools and services have emerged that address and alleviate email’s shortcom-ings—without placing an undue burden on IT.

Millennials are email’s biggest critics, and they are no-torious for avoiding it. Email harkens from a pre-mobile and social era, when digital communication happened exclusively from a PC, never without knowing exactly to whom you were speaking. With the advent of smart-phones and social platforms, those days are long gone. And while email has certainly migrated to mobile devices, it’s not exactly the most compelling app on today’s smart-phone screen.

Even older end users who have spent their entire professional lives inside their inboxes recognize email’s limitations. Indeed, there is a long list of things that email is singularly bad at, said Alan Lepofsky, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research.

Take file sharing. You include the file as an email

CoLLABorATIoN TooLS

hoMEYUrIY TSIrkUNoV/ISToCk

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attachment and send it on over. But those attachments suffer from poor version control, and they take up in-ordinate amounts of space and network bandwidth. It’s much better to provide users access to files shared in a central location, to maintain security and version control, and to save on network and storage resources. Likewise, project management and collaboration are common use cases for email that are better accomplished with more purpose-built tools.

Organizations have also long grappled with how to communicate with employees without constant access to a computer, whether they’re working on a construction site, in a hospital or on the sales floor. Meanwhile, just about everyone has a mobile device with which to send and receive text messages.

All of this makes it clear that organizations must ex-plore means of communicating and collaborating beyond email, and the onus is on IT to come up with those alter-natives. You just don’t want to wreak havoc on existing systems in the process.

thE sUItE spot

When evaluating alternatives or complements to tradi-tional email, it’s only natural to look to a devil you know:

next-generation versions of email systems already in place. On-premises Microsoft Exchange is rapidly morphing to Office365, and IBM Notes is now in the IBM Connections brand. Google Apps for Work, which seemed like such a radical evolution a few years ago, is also in this category.

If your organization is already on one of those plat-forms today—and who isn’t?—moving toward a suite is a logical choice, Lepofsky said. “There isn’t a company on the planet that doesn’t have email,” he said, and all the mainstream players are working hard to build on top of their respective email empires.

For example, this summer Microsoft announced Send, an iPhone app that allows Office 365 users to send short email messages to co-workers’ phones without even hav-ing to know the recipients’ phone numbers. Because the Send app keeps those communications within Outlook, the messages are also available for later review. IBM’s ven-erable Domino Web mail client, meanwhile, has morphed in to IBM Verse, which promises to use analytics to group and prioritize email conversations and blurs hard-and-fast lines between email and social connections.

But even as organizations move from on-premises to hosted versions of their email platforms, that still isn’t enough.

Cox Automotive, which spun out of media giant Cox

n Tools have emerged that address and alleviate email’s shortcomings.

n Connecting with deskless workers is just one example of things that email is bad at.

n IT can look to existing email vendors or discrete communication and collaboration vendors.

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Enterprise Communications last year, is slowly but surely replacing disparate on-premises Exchange systems with Office 365. Still, the company believed it needed to improve communication and collaboration across geo-graphically disparate groups, said Mark Satterfield, vice president of information technology at the firm.

“When you have 24,000 employees spread across the globe, it’s hard to share anything,” Satterfield said. “What do you do, have 1,000 people [copied] on an email?”

Instead, the company implemented a service from Jive Software for high-end collaboration (essentially “an inter-nal Facebook”) and replaced Microsoft SharePoint with an improved intranet.

By implementing Jive, the company can take its time migrating to Office 365 and avoid the hassle of trying to merge its various distribution lists. “We tell people that if you have more than five people on [an email], post it in Jive instead,” Satterfield said. As such, employees’ reliance on email tends to diminish, with fewer elaborate conver-sations happening there, replaced with alerts with links that drive you back to the collaboration site.

MoBIlIzE thIs

Nor is traditional email a perfect fit in a world of ubiqui-tous mobile devices. Mobile penetration among U.S. work-ers is fast approaching 100%, according to 451 Research in New York, but a huge proportion of employees are without regular access to a laptop or desktop computer.

That has prompted some organizations to focus their energies on mobilizing employee applications and

slack attackthEsE days No conversation about enterprise col-

laboration tools is complete without mentioning

newcomer Slack Inc., whose messaging service is

the talk the town. What is it about Slack, anyway,

that has garnered so much attention, when other

collaboration tools barely register?

“Slack’s momentum is completely deserved,

but at the same time, it kind of hit at exactly the

right time,” said Alan Lepofsky, vice president at

Collaboration research. However, from a busi-

ness standpoint, Slack has made a couple of wise

choices.

For one, it sells to departments rather than to

entire organizations. “It doesn’t require buy-in

from the entire company, and so it can grow up

inside the organization,” Lepofsky said.

Second, Slack from day one has focused on pro-

viding integrations to literally hundreds of other

applications. For example, it offers enterprise text

messaging integrations to WhatsApp-style tools

such as Cotap and Talko, and Chatops integra-

tions to gitHub and other Devops tools. n


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communications rather than trying to extend email or other Web-based collaboration platforms.

“There are many use cases and users that are simply not covered by email,” said Raul Castañón-Martínez, se-nior analyst on 451 Research’s mobility team. “Mobile can bridge that gap.”

For example, gaming giant Caesar’s Entertainment recently rolled out a mobile application that allows its 75,000 employees to access trainings, view HR documents and manage vacation time without needing a full Web browser. With theEMPLOYEEapp, and a branded corpo-rate mobile intranet, the company can push out important communications via text messages to employees.

Caesar’s employee’s no longer need to seek access “from a computer kiosk in a back room at a casino,” said Jeff Corbin, CEO and founder or APPrise Mobile, which designed the app. “That’s not something employees nec-essarily want to do when they’re on a 15-minute break.”

Go hostEd or Go hoME?

Once organizations decide that they need to do some-thing about email, the first question they usually tackle is whether to go with an on-premises tool or to the cloud.

To the surprise of exactly no one, companies are in-creasingly choosing cloud-hosted applications. While security and governance once gave organizations pause, many cloud application providers can reliably demon-strate that they are secure, with appropriate certifications and uptime guarantees, Lepofsky said.

Cox Automotive’s Satterfield is all in with cloud for

messaging and collaboration. “As the company’s CSO, five years ago, I wouldn’t have done it,” he said. But now, “We’re getting rid of everything on premises and jumping everything to the cloud.”

Not only is Satterfield comfortable with the security posture of cloud-hosted collaboration applications, he

prefers their simplicity. “It takes a lot of time and effort to do an upgrade,” he said. By deferring to Jive’s automatic updates, “I’ve pulled away from all that worry and we’re still getting new functionality every two or three weeks.”

But with cloud-based tools there are sticking points, such as backup, availability, overly frequent updates, lack of control and integration, said John Schneider, Jive’s senior director of product marketing. Like many early entrants in the collaboration and messaging market, the company’s offerings were originally on premises only, so they avoided those complications. These days, Schneider said, “a significant proportion of new customers choose cloud versus on premises, but our on-premises business is healthy and growing.”

Ultimately, the real question for IT isn’t so much

to thE sUrprIsE of Exactly No oNE, coMpaNIEs arE INcrEasINGly choosING cloUd-hostEd applIcatIoNs.


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which deployment model (or security certification, or integrations) to choose in a messaging and collaboration platform. What matters most is ensuring that end users actually use the messaging and collaboration platform you select for them—and that those tools aren’t more trouble than they’re worth, said Constellation’s Lepofsky.

“It’s almost become a cliché to say that people don’t like email and that they’re looking for alternatives,” Lepofsky said. Still, he points out, many of the same problems you

have with one tool will be found in another tool. Informa-tion overload, for example, has gone from bad to worse with the advent of social media, and you lose the benefit of organizing principles such as folders, he said.

“As much as we all hate email, at least it’s all in one inbox.” n



zzzzzz

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#hashtag Twitter on #VMware

harold Gale

@1wisegeek

Wish @VMware and @windowsserver would work together on a driver for nesting #VMware inside of #HyperV.

Gertner

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#VMware is like the cougar in infrastructure now. older but still pretty hot in a pinch.

harsha hosur

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I still get confused when people ask if I have Horizon experience. It’s still View to me :) #VMware

Barry rowlingson

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oh #vmware vSphere Web Client, I need you about once every six months and every time you fail in a new and unexpected way. Black Screen.

virtual-men

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#VMware #VirtualVolumes (#vvol) and #User Environment Manager (#UEM) awesome stuff!

roel wolters

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I am totally done with #vmware. After the upgrade to El Capitan, I won’t pay extra money for updates. Who needs Windows when you’ve got oSx?

rob Beekmans

@robbeekmans

What if #VMware would buy #Citrix? Use Netscaler, ditch xenServer, sell off xenMobile and build an awesome EUC experience for end users.

Brian Kirsch

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Added #vCloud Air, #openStack with #NSx in #VMware Hands-on labs. need chips and cold drink—call me in a few days

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EvEry yEar I try to ask as many VMworld attendees as possible about their overall impression of the show. In previous years I’ve jotted down notes with words like “wow,” “disruptive” and “game-changing.” This year, it wasn’t a particular word, but more of a sound that I kept hearing:

“Meh.”Part of this ambivalence could simply be the result of

more straightforward, less jazzy keynote presentations. It’s rumored that VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger has put the kibosh on much of the theatrical song-and-dance numbers that previously opened the event. For the first time I can remember, speakers entered and exited from the front of the stage, returning to the audience when they finished rather than disappearing behind a curtain. And a worrying

number of attendees walked out of the first keynote ad-dress before Kit Colbert, the CTO of cloud-native apps, even took the stage. However, most VMworld attendees are serious IT professionals who come to learn about new technologies—not to be entertained.

thE UNINspIrEd UpdatEs

The real problem with VMworld 2015 was that the new releases and updates the company shared weren’t all that impressive (with a couple of notable exceptions around containers). Potential customers must wait longer for EVO:RACK (rebranded as EVO SDDC) without expla-nation. Incremental dot-one updates to Virtual SAN and vRealize aren’t anything to get excited over, and release notes for NSX 6.2 read more like a bug fix than a step forward.

Even a feature that drew applause, cloud-to-cloud vMotion, introduced as technology preview Project Sky-scraper, could highlight the frustrations some customers see in the company’s marketing message. The capability still has no availability timeline, and while it’s a great feature, it should have been the focal point of VMware’s vCloud Air years ago. The company’s pitch for its hybrid cloud approach has always been about convincing IT pros that seamless integration with vSphere is the reason to choose vCloud Air over public cloud competitors.

VMWorLD 2015

vMware’s year of ‘Meh’With a chance to energize its customer base, VMware hit a single instead of a home run. BY NICk MArTIN


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One cloud infrastructure engineer in attendance put it perfectly: “[VMware is] now trying to adapt to the speed at which they’ve forced the industry to move.”

In fact, that was the focus of Gelsinger’s keynote address on day two. The level of innovation today is such that established companies like VMware, he said, must drive harder to outpace startups. But his words don’t seem to reflect the reality of the company’s approach.

a frUstratINGly slow pacE

VMware has been hesitant to adopt the very strategies that enable startups to challenge the status quo. Newcomers, like SimpliVity and Nutanix, have pushed their hyper-con-verged infrastructure products into data centers partly by offering deep discounts, knowing that once they’re within a company, customers are likely to come back for more. But when VMware rolled out its EVO:RAIL appliance, potential customers complained the price was too high. More importantly, VMware forced customers to buy more vSphere licenses along with its appliance whether they needed them or not.

EVO:RAIL has galvanized startups that were once valued partners (think Nutanix) against VMware and ir-ritated customers. Even VMware’s hardware partners for its EVO line are frustrated with the company’s strategies and slow pace. HP dropped its EVO:RAIL offering after just a few months.

When asked why EVO SDDC still wasn’t available for sale, two representatives from one vendor on VMware’s hardware partner list said their company couldn’t start

building—never mind selling—EVO SDDC appliances until the next version of VSAN and vRealize were avail-able, because current versions either didn’t have the re-quired scalability or weren’t compatible with the platform.

Perhaps the best example of how the company is fail-ing to act like a startup is in its approach to selling its software-defined networking product, NSX. VMware acquired Nicira Networks and the technology behind NSX in 2012 and has hesitated to offer a free evaluation version of the software. Had Nicira rejected buyout offers, there’s little doubt that the startup would have needed to prove its value by offering trial versions and attractive licensing deals to build credibility and a new customer base. VMware representatives have said that the company is in business to make money and that giving away NSX wouldn’t make sense, but in some respects they’re wrong. In this age, an established vendor can’t simply expect its existing customer base to jump at every new product.

When describing its challenges, some VMware watch-ers fall back to the traditional narrative of heavyweight battles, pitting vSphere versus Microsoft’s Hyper-V, or even NSX versus Cisco’s ACI. These fights are often snooze-fests with each side taking punches but both stand-ing strong. In this landscape it won’t be other established companies that threaten VMware’s livelihood—it will be the welterweight startups (perhaps one we haven’t heard of yet) capable of staying one step ahead and pivoting on a dime that will ultimately topple a giant. n

NIcK MartIN is a senior site editor with TechTarget. Contact him at [email protected].



It opEratIoNs tEaMs that consider application program interfaces, or APIs, to be the wonkish purview of devel-opers will be surprised to learn how far these interfaces have come in their overall strategic importance to a corporation.

APIs are linkages that offer a set of tools and protocols to describe how one program should talk to another. But more recently, the definition has broadened to refer to not just the specifics of the API itself, but to networked collaborative services as well.

Amazon provided one of the earliest strategic uses of external APIs when it offered up its e-commerce engine to booksellers and other retailers wishing to sell on Amazon. “Amazon became not just a retailer, but a facilitator of an ecosystem in which they get a cut,” said Randy Heffner, an analyst at Forrester Research, in Cambridge, Mass. “This was all due to API enablement.”

Large public API programs such as those offered by Am-azon, Twitter and Google, were the first externally facing APIs. Now, enterprises use their own to link their apps to partners, as well as APIs that link internal departments in creation of microservices. Developers and IT shops receive requests from within to expose some aspects of their data to the outside world. In some cases it may even

APIs

hoMEJETTA ProDUCTIoNS/gETTY IMAgES

Mind the apIsAn influx of application program interfaces

require new forms of IT oversight.BY MArgIE SEMILoF


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create an opportunity to monetize that data.“We’ve moved from a world where APIs were [a Silicon

Valley thing] to where almost everyone in the general economy is doing something with them,” said Steve Will-mott, a former researcher and developer and current CEO at 3scale, an API management company he founded.

It’s significant that APIs are much easier to create than they used to be. The predominant technologies used to create APIs in the 2000s, Simple Object Access Protocol and XML, have given way to REST (Representational State Transfer) APIs, which is an architectural style based on the HTTP protocol, and that uses JavaScript Object Notation as the preferred format.

These lightweight development techniques helped one utility company move from traditional XML data to API gateways. Essent, which is the largest energy company in the Netherlands, uses externally facing APIs to commu-nicate with electric car charging stations and other third party vendors.

At Essent, customers can see which charging station is available via a Web app that receives real-time API data from an API gateway from French vendor Axway. Simi-larly, Essent has real-time data to tell if a car charging sta-tion is operational or not, according to Niels Wolf, senior architect at Essent, based in Amsterdam.

Essent started funneling data through APIs about four years ago to give more flexibility to customers and partners. This has made life easier for IT pros and devel-opers—the biggest benefits are having a central place to take on a potential security threat and to allow multiple different protocol types on the same information flow.

“It’s why we use a specific gateway,” Wolf said. “You can set rules for all [API] calls at the same time. If we get attacked we have a good location to fend off and offer flexibility at the same time.”

apI sEcUrIty aNd MaNaGEMENt

There is a significant to-do list for developers and IT shops before making strategic use of APIs. Most businesses will likely need to write new code to support data accessed through an API, since the original application probably uses data differently than how consumers or partners may need or want to access that data.

Once access is established through APIs, companies must secure, manage, authenticate and authorize access to the data, said Anne Thomas, an analyst at Gartner Inc., in Stamford, Conn. She recommends using API gateways and other tools to make sure APIs are not overwhelmed.

Most of the major software companies, such as IBM,

n The definition of APIs has broadened to refer to networked collaborative services.

n Enterprises now use their own external-facing APIs to link their apps to partners.

n APIs are much easier to create than they used to be.

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Oracle, Microsoft, TIBCO Software Inc. and Software AG, make API management tools for both internally and externally facing APIs. Some small independents are also in this market, such as 3scale, APImetrics, Runscope Inc. and Apigee Corp.

The market is in somewhat of a consolidation phase, as Layer 7 Technologies is now part of the CA Technolo-gies API management suite. The aforementioned Axway owns the API developer, Vordel. TIBCO Software recently acquired Mashery from Intel. Most vendors offer API management tools that focus on both internal and exter-nal APIs.

The use of API data in new ways may create some unin-tended internal conflicts in a company. When you create services to share across internal workgroups, one group could potentially shoulder the entire cost of the service. Placing the cost burden on one group over another could lead to corporate infighting, Forrester’s Heffner said.

But there could also be some enormous benefits. By having immediate access to data through an API call, companies might see patterns of access that might not have been visible before, which may result in entirely new products for the company.

A well-known example is from farm machinery maker, John Deere, which has collected telemetry data from cus-tomer farm equipment since the mid-2000s. Data flows from an external API to a software application that helps farmers make decisions about crops, such as what kind of seeds to buy and how fast to buy them. John Deere can share this data with external sources that might make rec-ommendations for farmers regarding their seed selection

attributes of a Great apI n documentation should be public. Public docs

get seen by more people for the maximum amount of review, and should be in good order to be consumed.

n clients should be language and os agnostic. rEST accomplishes this.

n an apI must be accessible to windows as well as linux developers. c# and rEST-based APIs accomplish this as they are based on hyper-links.

n an external apI is in use by the team that created it. If there are deficiencies in your API, your developers will be the first to find them.

n Example clients are publicly available. You need to provide APIs with samples on how to use it.

n the apI must be secure. APIs should be pro-tected by the same authorization and authen-tication as other interfaces (gUI, WUI, and/or command-line). New versions of an API should present minimal changes and they should be backwards compatible.

n the apI should be scalable. An API should be able to withstand significant traffic

—BErNArD SANDErS, CTO, CloudBolt Software


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and fertilizer, according to the company.At Essent, Wolf said it’s possible that companies that

make its charging equipment, or a car manufacturer, such as Tesla, might want access to the data. This could lead to new products or services, though that is still on the horizon.

rollING oUt NEw apIs

One way to start an API management plan is to create taxonomy of existing corporate APIs. APIs are governed differently and have different design points and security requirements depending on whether the application is internally facing, externally facing, or mobile.

Companies that decide to develop an externally facing API that gains revenue must deliver a high quality API out of the gate. If a potential business partner tries to link with that API but has trouble with the data, the prob-lems may extend further than bad design. “All good will

and enthusiasm evaporates,” said Bernard Sanders, CTO at CloudBolt Software, a cloud management software company.

Building a great API requires the attention of both de-velopers and operations teams. Operations must tune the linkages for performance, reliability, capacity and security. Developers must ensure that APIs are backwards compat-ible so any changes don’t break previously existing API clients. Version management and communicating new API versions to partners is crucial if partners are accessing your API data.

If a company does create a new business out of API data, it may need more than security or monitoring software; it may require service level agreements. The APIs are now part of your business model, so they had better work. n

MarGIE sEMIlof is editorial director of TechTarget’s Data Center and Virtualization Media Group. Contact her at msemilof@techtarget .com.



w


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D what drives your investment in Ethernet for your storage network?*

D what storage networking technologies are you planning to buy in the next 12 months?*

SoUrCE: TECHTArgET’S 2015 NETWork INFrASTrUCTUrE SUrVEY; BASED oFF rESPoNSES FroM 80 IT AND BUSINESS ProFESSIoNALS.

*MULTIPLE SELECTIoNS ALLoWED oN ALL QUESTIoNS

68D Percentage of respondents who will invest in WAN routers/Edge devices in the next 12 months*



61%

51%

43%

41%

35%

25%

3%

Simplify management of combined data center/storage network

Converge storage and data center networks

Enable storage on demand

Enable virtualization and segmentation in storage networks

Lower cost of scaling storage capacity

Enable cloud model with non-blocked application delivery

other, please specify

Multiple storage protocols over

Ethernet

Fibre Channel over

Ethernet

Infiniband over

Ethernet

76%

44%14%


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It’s No sEcrEt that, thanks to Docker, containers are all the rage, and that Docker containers are based on Linux. So where does that leave Microsoft? In an interesting place, it turns out. Modern Infrastructure caught up with Microsoft veteran John Gossman—and an architect on the Azure core team—for his take on the situation.

containers have been around a long time. prior

to docker, did you see much demand for the

technology?

No, we did not. [Windows has had] some fundamental fea-tures that you need to do containers for a long time now.

For example, Job Objects, like Linux cgroups, allows you to control resource consumption. And there have been third-party attempts to do [Windows] containers in the past, but without access to the kernel, it’s impossible to do it well. What [Docker creator] Solomon Hykes did was combine a bunch of container technologies in to a nice feature set for developers. It was really an aesthetic innovation, and I think it took everyone by surprise—even Solomon.

what, in a nutshell, is Microsoft’s container strategy?

You can think of it as two separate efforts that dovetail well, but that can also been seen independently.

For one, we want containers to work well for Windows, which you can see as part of Windows Server Containers, a feature of Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 3. That preview also includes a Docker agent, the same codebase that is used to run Docker Engine. It doesn’t mean that you can run a Linux Docker container on Windows, or a Windows container on Linux, but you do get the same management experience. You’ll be able to use Docker tools like Swarm and Compose to manage Windows Server Containers. It also sets up some interesting hybrid structures: for example, a back end running Microsoft SQL Server with a front end running Apache Linux. We will also support alternate sets of interfaces—[such as] Canonical LXD and our own native APIs—for managing

Q&A

a window on Microsoft containersContainers are largely a Linux thing, but that won’t always be true. BY ALEx BArrETT


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containers, but we expect that most of the ecosystem will use Docker.

And then, for Azure, if customers want to use contain-ers, we want to make sure they work well with Azure. To-day, we are focused on Docker for Linux on Azure, making it easy to deploy a Docker image there. We have a Docker extension where you just click a box to make sure that a Docker Engine gets created when you create an instance. We’re also building out our Docker management and monitoring capabilities.

what kind of interest are you seeing

from customers?

We are seeing interest both on the Azure side as well as from the on-premises Windows Server side. There’s a lot of overlap between the two. Part of that is because very few enterprises are entirely homogeneous. The hybrid story is what’s attractive to them. Azure, too, is increasingly heterogeneous. The last time I checked a couple of weeks ago, 25% of VMs running on Azure were running Linux. At the beginning of the year, that number was at 20%.

what about container security?

First of all, I wouldn’t say that containers are insecure. If you’re running in your own data center and you trust all your own people, you should run containers without

any concerns. It’s when you’re in a hostile multi-tenant environment [such as a public cloud] that we recommend—as do all the other public cloud provid-ers—to run with VMs [for their hardware isolation].

In fact, we believe that containers and virtualiza-

tion are two technologies that are completely complemen-tary to one another. Both of them have their advantages and disadvantages, but I don’t believe there’s a technolog-ical reason to have those compromises. And this isn’t the end: At some point, containers and virtual machines are going to converge. We’ve talked publicly about Hyper-V Containers, an upcoming feature of Windows Server, where we take the same public API as a container, and wrap a lightweight Hyper-V partition around it. This gets you the same level of security that you would have in a virtual environment, plus it allows you to run incompati-ble kernels. There are lots of other efforts out there—for example HyperHQ, a startup out of Beijing. [Ed. Note: Not to mention VMware’s Photon Platform.] It’s an obvious place to go. n


GossMaN



data storaGE Is usually evaluated along predictable lines —capacity, reliability and throughput. However, a new breed of storage systems claims to embed intelligence within the array to more efficiently organize and manage what’s inside.

Data-aware storage, as its been called, is a general term for multiple flavors of technology that aim to make the storage process smarter, more efficient and perhaps even more secure. It is designed to replace primary storage directly and add data-aware features that are “architec-turally and generally capable of handling multiple appli-cations on a broader scale,” said Jeff Kato, senior analyst at the Taneja Group, in Hopkinton, Mass.

While raw storage has decreased in price, the cost to manage storage has, in effect, been rising as storage vol-umes grow and as issues such as compliance become more important, Kato said. Meanwhile, a confluence of factors such as virtualization, flash storage, and more processing cycles make it technically possible to embed the neces-sary intelligence within the storage array to provide the needed awareness.

Of course, data-aware storage isn’t the first variation on the generic storage theme. Over the past decade, technologies like auto-tiering have helped to move less

hoME

DATA STorAgE

SorBETTo/ISToCk

Not your average disk array

Using metadata and analytics, data-aware storage offers much more than IoPS and capacity.

BY ALAN EArLS


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active data to lower-cost storage, Kato said. Other types of software have been fielded to automatically expunge files at the end of a defined retention period. Then there is application-aware storage, which is supposed to mon-itor and optimize storage to match the needs of specific applications. But all of those innovations were relatively narrow in focus and limited in what they provided.

Today’s data-aware storage players have more ambitious goals—providing insight and analytics on massive data sets, or improving compliance and security.

Seattle-based Qumulo, for instance, “uses data-aware analytics to solve massive scale-out data-sets in the peta-bytes range,” Kato said. So if a business is building a big data system and needs to share that information to lots of users, Qumulo uses real-time analytics to manage data at that scale with billions of files.

Atomic Fiction, a visual effects studio based in Los Angeles, had repeatedly set up custom applications to deliver needed insights to manage and care for the enor-mous files used in its business—and to help account for IT costs—“some successful and some not,” said Robert Jordan head of systems at the firm.

With Qumulo, “we are very excited to finally see an intelligent way to access metadata that we have previously had to do in other ways,” Jordan said. The development

makes it easier to track costs on a per-project basis. Fur-thermore, the real-time nature of reporting makes it easier for both staff and users to assess storage, and to delete, or reorganize.

“Honestly it’s about time,” Jordan said.For DataGravity, located in Nashua, N.H., the focus is

on highly regulated customers or organizations with sen-sitive customer information. “They use real-time analytics to recognize if someone should not have accessed a file as well as whether a file contains any personally identifiable information,” Kato said. DataGravity is more oriented toward midsized customers and is very successful with legal firms, he added.

But the DataGravity approach resonates with non-reg-ulated environments too. Jim Cutrona, senior systems en-gineer at Encore Wire, a McKinney, Texas manufacturer, was in the midst of bidding traditional commodity storage when happened on DataGravity. He said he was pleased

n A new breed of storage systems claims to embed intelligence within the array.

n Applying real-time analytics against metadata can provide better security and manageability.

n Most data-aware storage comes as an integrated appliance.

HIgHLIgHTS

today’s data-awarE storaGE playErs havE MorE aMBItIoUs Goals.


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to discover that the DataGravity product offered so many useful insights into storage and, by implication, into other aspects of IT operations without costing more than the commodity alternatives.

“I was sick of having people sell me IOPS. Now that I have DataGravity I find myself in the data all the time,” he says. Cutrona likes the file analytics and the performance charts that DataGravity provides and “when a user calls to complain about a missing file I can tell them exactly when they deleted it—and ask them if they would like me to recover it for them.”

why data-awarE?

The development of data-aware storage should be viewed within the larger market trend of vendors trying to push more unique storage offerings, analysts said. “What I’m seeing is other storage vendors trying to add some re-al-time analytics to a platform they already have,” said Taneja’s Kato. The companies that are doing so are gener-ally all-flash array or flash-optimized and are adding more advanced metadata into the platform, he said. Usually these analytical tools are focused on performance optimi-zation and quality of service tracking. “With architectures that now are born with a flash first mentality—it means the door is open to adding a much richer set of metadata, therefore expanding that to data-aware features and ana-lytics is a natural extension,” Kato said.

But the advent of data-aware storage goes beyond just technical developments. “Storage is very mature, a high margin business that is being attacked on all sides,

especially from the cloud,” said Henry Baltazar, senior analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass. Storage vendors realize that cloud providers as well as analytics companies will do anything to get customer storage busi-ness so they “can leverage that as the basis for service offerings.” Rather than succumb to that onslaught, storage vendors are adding more bells and whistles, such as the new Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) capability available for EMC Isilon. Qumulo and DataGravity are part of that trend, he said—adding new storage capabili-ties that will tilt customers back toward on-site, terrestrial storage.

Still, Baltazar doesn’t see the data-aware storage trend having much impact on the market for a while. “At this point it is mostly money being put in, and R&D,” he ex-plains. Other vendors will probably build systems like this or will add capabilities to get this kind of data knowledge, he said.

applyING data-awarE

Market pressures aside, data aware storage has piqued a lot of interest, said Scott Sinclair, storage analyst at ESG, in Milford, Mass. “What is most compelling is the ability to double click into a specific file and identify high security components in that information—things that may have escaped the attention of compliance folks or security pol-icies—and this works in real time,” he said.

And there is an obvious benefit to consolidating capa-bilities in an appliance—as both DataGravity and Qumulo have done—rather than through a bolted-on approach.


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“There are benefits and some challenges; because this is in its infancy organizations are still trying to figure out how to use it, which aspects are useful, what are is the TCO and ROI across various processes, and whether some of this is just a gimmick,” Sinclair said.

One risk is getting on board with a vendor’s proprietary approach to data-aware that turn out to be dead-ends. “There is always a risk if these companies lock in these ad-vanced capabilities,” said Taneja’s Kato. To that end, Taneja encourages vendors to use open-APIs and be transparent on their data-aware features.” In other words, a data-aware storage platform should provide APIs to address its re-al-time analytics and any other of its actionable features. “For any standards to take hold, even if they are more or less de-facto standards, it will only happen if the vendors are transparent and open with them,” said Kato.

Overall, the whole concept of data-aware storage is still so new that customers are being forced to make an up-front investment in a storage array where the value

—potential improvements in processes and organizational efficiency—may not be evident or even understood for a period of a few years.

“It depends how critical these challenges are to you, what your over all data center infrastructure looks like, and a host of other factors,” said ESG’s Sinclair.

Figuring out whether data awareness becomes a mar-ket driver and who might win in the space may depend on which vendor organization can identify the aspects of analytics that provide the most value and build solutions on that basis to address real pain points, he said.

Data-aware storage players are working closely with their customer base to figure that out and to understand what new tools should be applied and which are less im-pactful, Sinclair said. “It is very much of a ‘time-will-tell’ story.” n

alaN r. Earls is a Boston-based freelance writer focused on business and technology.


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coUld coNtaINErs dEthroNE virtual machines as the next generation compute architecture? I’ve heard many industry folks say that containers are moving faster into real deployments than almost any previous technology, driven by application developers, DevOps and busi-ness-side folks looking for agility as much as IT needs efficiency and scale.

Containers were one of the hottest topics at VMworld 2015. VMware clearly sees a near-term mash-up of VMs and containers coming quickly to corporate data centers.

And IT organizations still need to uphold security and data management requirements—even with containerized ap-plications. VMware has done a bang-up job of delivering that on the VM side, and now it’s weighed in with designs that extend its virtualization and cloud management tools to support (and, we think, ultimately assimilate) enter-prise containerization projects.

VMware’s new vSphere Integrated Containers (VICs) make managing and securing containers, which in this case are running nested in virtual machines (called “vir-tual container hosts”), pretty much the same as managing and securing traditional VMs. The VICs show up in VM-ware management tools as first-class IT managed objects equivalent to VMs, and inherit much of what of vSphere offers to virtual machine management, including robust security. This makes container adoption something every VMware customer can simply slide into.

However, here at Taneja Group we think the real turn-ing point for container adoption will be when containers move beyond being simply stateless compute engines and deal directly with persistent data. Until that happens, containers will be necessarily limited in scope and scale.

what’s IN a coNtaINEr?

Briefly, a container encapsulates and isolates application code inside a container process that makes the code

THE NExT BIg THINg

wanted: persistent container storage Containers can’t remain stateless if they’re to see broad adoption. BY MIkE MATCHETT


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believe it has a machine all to itself, translating any system service calls out to the container host. Since containers are really just processes, many (possibly thousands of) containers can easily share a single server, whether that is a physical or virtual server.

The contained application bits think they have a whole running operating system to themselves (like they would if hosted in a virtual machine), but they are actually shar-ing the host OS. This is less isolation between applications than virtual machines provide, but also more efficient (because each container is not running its own OS).

There are other advantages. Containers run in user space and thus are less likely to corrupt, block or crash anything at the kernel level. Containers are quickly cop-ied, often cached, and can be readily spun up and down. By design, containers can be fully built almost anywhere (like on all those developer MacBooks) and then run any-where else consistently (like on Amazon Web Services). But all this means that containers were originally designed to be stateless, containing no data that needed protection or persistence.

Containers were originally designed for building mi-croservices. A microservices architecture is great for apps architected for the cloud. These new apps have container-ized bits that are stateless in that they persist no internal data and can come and go (outside of atomic micro-trans-actions) dynamically as operational needs dictate.

Containerized application storage, however, is still a big thorn. Apps running inside a container can access the local OS storage, but if the container is moved (or cloned, replicated, et cetera) to another container host, it doesn’t

take any current host data with it. As such, stateless con-tainers are not suitable for a wide variety of applications that need a reliable and persistent data service. Micros-ervices that persist data at a micro-transaction level into cloud storage, such as AWS Simple Storage Service (S3), work well, but most applications need more than that.

solvING for storaGE

Does that mean that containers will have a small part to play in tomorrow’s data center, limited to developers’ play-grounds or new cloud-hosted microservices applications? We think the benefits of containers are too attractive to the enterprise data center to ignore, and as you might have guessed, container data management products are emerging.

ClusterHQ’s Flocker, for example, adds the ability for a container to mount a unique Flocker dataset that moves with it, even across container hosts. This dataset is parti-tioned under the covers by the Flocker controller out of shared block storage that is mounted to all the container hosts. With this tool, containers become “stateful” and can now readily host almost anything, even databases like MongoDB and MySQL.

As of version 1.3, Flocker supports OpenStack Cinder block storage and direct custom drivers from the likes of EMC, NetApp, Hedvig and Nexenta, with more coming soon. At VMworld, VMware announced Flocker support through a vSphere driver so any vSphere-mounted storage will be available to containers. This also includes both Virtual SAN and third-party storage that supports its


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Virtual Volumes. Both scenarios are interesting, as they add explicit storage services, such as quality of service to each container’s storage, just as they do to VMs.

In their limited stateless form, containers and VMs each have a defined role to play. Now that containers sup-port virtualized storage directly, hypervisor vendors will need to act quickly to offer high value-add capabilities. Since the future data center will likely be a mixed VM/con-tainer environment with plenty of nesting of containers within VMs (and support hybrid, DevOps-centric cloud operations) there will be plenty of opportunities for them

to provide cohesive management tools. Containers are helping us build a more fluid, agile, but

ultimately convoluted environment. That means everyone will need even better security tools, more dynamic net-working and, of course, more adaptable storage. Be sure to let us know how your IT organization is adapting and adopting container products, and what challenges you see to broader containerization. n

MIKE MatchEtt is a senior analyst and consultant at Taneja Group. Contact him at [email protected].



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I sUspEct that many of you would consider me young. But let’s just say that I’m old enough to understand comments my parents made to me while I was a kid. That’s part of why I like IT—age doesn’t really matter. I know people at retirement age that can show the DevOps crowd a few things, and I know people younger than me who are working as IT managers and consultants, smart and cre-dentialed with MBAs and whatnot, and very successful despite their youth.

At heart I’m a tech. I’ve always loved taking things apart, rebuilding them, fixing them, and that attitude shows in my work in IT and my columns. But as I grow older I am increasingly intolerant of bad product design that makes me work harder, vendors that don’t get things right either intentionally or maliciously, and needing to

rely on rote memorization and busy work to configure sys-tems and applications. There are no more challenges for me in traditional IT, and things that seem like challenges are mostly the result of bad system design. It makes sense that I’ve gravitated toward the cloud, and have started embracing the idea that clouds aren’t about technology, but are about people and process.

You can move all your workloads to the cloud and not change your business one bit. But when you embrace the ideas the cloud offers—the simplicity, the application and system design goals—your whole perception of IT shifts. More specifically, you no longer perceive the problems in IT to be just a matter of assembling the right combination of software and hardware. Instead, you start to see the problems as process and alignment issues—that IT is not headed in the same direction as the business, and that the process and fiefdoms it has developed over the last 30 years are an anchor weighing it down, preventing the ship from turning.

I’ve thought a lot about all my colleagues and peers caught in the world of traditional IT that don’t have the benefit of years of thinking about clouds. They’re heads-down doing work to keep the old infrastructure alive and don’t have time for the newfangled stuff. In doing that work, though, they become that anchor that c-level lead-ers need to jettison in order to move the business closer to where it wants to be.

IN THE MIx

viva la revoluciónIT needs to understand the big business picture to remain relevant. BY BoB PLANkErS


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The more I work with IT and business management, the more I realize that nobody sees these people as a resource. IT staff carry tons of organizational knowledge that cannot be replaced by consultants or a cloud. But ask these peo-ple why they’re doing something, or how that something specifically helps the business, and they don’t have a good answer. Why is that? Because nobody has informed them of the goals of the business.

I’ve transformed myself a few times in my career, and I’m doing so again as I work between IT staff and business management. More IT staff need to be transformed like this, to see the larger business picture, explain it to others,

and design and operate systems around it. The gap be-tween the rank and file of IT and the business itself must close, and the way to do that is by making sure IT staff can answer the “why” of their work, not just the “what” and “how.”

Not all dogs can be taught new tricks, but business leaders will be pleasantly surprised with what happens when even just a few of its workers start to understand the big picture. n

BoB plaNKErs is a virtualization and cloud architect at a major Midwestern university.

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MI Modern Infrastructuredocs.media.bitpipe.com/io_12x/io_127477/item... · on Microsoft Containers THE NExT BIg THINg Persistent Container Storage Beyond Email For better or worse,