IT Management and Cloud Blog

Zenny the Zebra and the Future of IT Mangagement

By John | July 19, 2008

The Zenoss boys never miss a beat when it comes to recruiting Zenpack contributors. Sorry Matt he is way to young to work on Zenpacks. However, he has written his first “Hello World” in python on his OLPC. Both boys love the Zenny the Zebra beach balls and they both told me to say thank you to whoever this Zenoss dude is. Toys for the boys typically earn triple bounus points around the Willis household.

I am assuming the fedora is for me and not the kids based on my recent IT Management podcast with Coté . In the podcast Coté asked me why I no longer include Zenoss apparel in my “No Country for Old IT Guys” photos. The simple answer was that it is summer and the jacket typically stays home. So yesterday I was supprised to find a box in the mail with the Zenny beach balls and my new fedora. Perfect timing guys, I am just about to hit the road for the next three weeks on the “No Country” tour.

Thanks Guys :)

Topics: other, sillystory | No Comments »

Cloud Cafe Podcast #10 - Flexiscale

By John | July 19, 2008

This is a great podcast. I had the opportunity to have a discussion with Tony Lucus the founder Flexiscale. Some people refer to Flexiscale as the Amazon AWS of EMEA. We were able to discuss a vast array of cloud topics as follows:

Listen to the Podcast Here

I wanted to add a special thanks to Florence Neal for the artwork and Mike Colletti for the music. If you find any of their works interesting, please feel free to link their sites and contact them directly.

Topics: cloudcafe | No Comments »

The Laughing Boardroom - IBM eServer iSeries

By John | July 18, 2008

I am not a huge fan of the IBM iSeries or what used to called an AS/400; however, this video below really hit home when thinking about a utility company I worked with last year. The video describes what this utility company should have done last year when IBM told them they should move from iSeries to pSeries. Basically they should have laughed the IBM pSeries guys out of their boardroom.

This regional, rather large, utility company had been running AS/400 for twenty years with a minimal staff. In fact the current CTO was one of the original AS/400 operators and prior to about a year ago he could have still filled in as an operator in a pinch. Other than some simple web front-ends they basically ran one production box that did all their customer care and billing services. About two years ago a team of consultants were brought in to re-deign their customer care and billing systems. The initial design took them from one production AS/400 (they called it a mainframe) to about 10 P5 physical boxes with about 50 lpars of which about 20 lpars eventually became the replacement solution. On the software side they went from a single box that basically handled everything to a very complex infrastructure.

2 Production cluster Oracle RAC servers
2 Websphere servers
2 Tuxedo servers
2 Customer care application servers
2 Domino servers
2 BI and reporting server2
4 Tivoli Servers
2 Servers for Rational
1 NIM server for managing AIX
1 AIX server for administration and management
2 DS8100 SANs

After the army of consultants had completed the project (over a year) this utility company went from 3 system administrators to about 10 system administrators and they were still understaffed. They also increased head counts for 2 system architects and a project managers. Of course at least three new managers had to be hired. All told they went from a staff of about 5 (including CTO and operations) to a staff of about 20. This particular utility company was also known for being penny wise and pound foolish when it came to paying consulting rates so they also suffered severely from a lack of experience on a lot of the state-of-the-art software they were running. Needless to say their systems went down a lot more often than they did when they were running their mainframe.

However, the most ironic thing about this video is that it is typically an IBM’r that is the guy pitching the charts.

Topics: other | No Comments »

IT Management Podcast #016

By John | July 18, 2008

“She’s using the router to dry her clothes” - OpenNMS’s Tarus Balog

“Everything on the other side of the keyboard is Network Management.”

Tarus Balog

Topics: itmanagementguys | 2 Comments »

Moodle on Amazon Web Services

By John | July 17, 2008

Digital Chalk recently announced integration of Moodle with AWS.  Moodle is an open source Learning Management System (LMS) that is registered with almost 40,000 sites and has over 15 million users.   Many  Universities currently use Moodle as their primary LMS.  Moodle is also used by quite a few service training delivery providers.  Combining Moodle with Digital Chalk’s education development tool and low cost delivery model seems like a sweet combo.  I look forward to learning more on exactly what features Digital Chalk will be providing with this new service.

Topics: amazon, aws, ec2, esm, moodle, other, s3 | No Comments »

White Paper on ‘Cloud Architectures’ S3, EC2, SimpleDB, SQS

By John | July 16, 2008

White Paper on ‘Cloud Architectures’ and Best Practices of Amazon S3, EC2, SimpleDB, SQS

Very cool!

Topics: amazon, ec2 | No Comments »

No Country for Old IT Guys

By John | July 15, 2008

The “No Country” show over at Flickr…

Topics: nocountry | 1 Comment »

Cloud Cafe Podcast #8

By John | July 15, 2008

In this podcast I was able to speak to another customer of the “cloud”. Brad Jefferson the CEO of Animoto shares some of his experiences and thoughts about the cloud. Animoto uses Rightscale as their cloud infrastructure partner. Brad discusses their infamous week where Animoto went from 25k users to 700k users in 5 days and they had to scale from 50 to 5k servers. About 10 minutes before the call I went out and created my first Animoto short video. Here is my Cloud Cafe Animoto short video:


…

Listen to the Podcast Here

I wanted to add a special thanks to Florence Neal for the artwork and Mike Colletti for the music. If you find any of their works interesting, please feel free to link their sites and contact them directly.

Topics: cloud computing | 2 Comments »

TIOBE Programming Community Index for July 2008

By John | July 15, 2008

The TIOBE programming language rankings is out again. Python seems to keeps inching up. However, the big story is Microsoft’s Powershell. Powershell wasn’t even ranked in the previous year now it is 15. Also Lua and D are interesting top 20’s. I also had a little fun in this post by using an IBM Alphaworks project called Many Eyes to render the pie chart.

Topics: other | 2 Comments »

Not Your Momma’s Core - IBM Power 7 Chip

By John | July 14, 2008

The Register reports that IBM will ship a Power7 chip that clocks at 4.0GHz in 2010. Here is a list of some of the goodies…

Topics: ibm | 1 Comment »

When all you have is a hammer …

By John | July 13, 2008

everything looks like a …

…

Topics: other | No Comments »

Top 10 Enterprises in the Cloud

By John | July 13, 2008

I decided to put together a list of 10 examples of entpereises using the clouds.

  1. The NY Times
    Amazon EC2
  2. Nasdaq
    Amazon S3
  3. Major League Baseball
    Joyent
  4. ESPN
    Rightscale using Amazon EC2
  5. Hasbro
    Amazon EC2
  6. British Telecom
    3Tera
  7. Taylor Woodrow
    Google Apps
  8. CSS
    Amazon EC2
  9. Activision
    Amazon EC2
  10. Business Objects (A SAP Company)
    Rightscale using Amazon EC2

If you know of any others please feel free to add in the comments section.

Here are some other cloud related links…

Cloud Vendors A to Z
Is Everyone an aaS?

Topics: other | 4 Comments »

RumorMill: Microsoft to Rollout EC2 for Windows

By John | July 13, 2008

RumorMill: Microsoft to Rollout EC2 for Windows in October 2008

…

Topics: ec2, microsoft | No Comments »

Botchanmics: The Dimmer Switch

By John | July 12, 2008

We were able to catch up with Botchagalupe, the international IT man of mystery, and pin him down long enouth to get his thoughts about whats going in IT.

Johnmwillis: Hello, Botchagalupe, its good to have you back again.

Botchagalupe: Yea, yeah, sure, sure.

Johnmwillis: What have you been up to?

Botchagalupe: Oh, the usual. I bowl. Drive around. The occasional acid flashback.

Johnmwillis: The last time you were here you were talking about Botchanomics.

Botchagalupe: Nah, I am getting a little tired of the whole IT thing. These days I am just throwing rocks.

Johnmwillis: Throwing Rocks?

Botchagalupe: Your obviously not a bowler.

Johnmwillis: Surely you have something to say about all this “Cloud” talk that is going on.

Botchagalupe: Yea, yeah, sure, sure, Clouds, yea, yea.

Johnmwillis: Please do tell.

Botchagalupe: Dude, Nick Carr has brain washed us all. He has everyone thinking that there has to be some kind of big switch that has to occur when it comes to the cloud. In the enterprise the debate always centers around will the enterprise switch to the cloud or won’t they. Carr’s got everyone thinking it has to be an all or nothing. I prefer to call it the “Dimmer Switch” when it comes to the enterprise.

Johnmwillis: Hey come on, you got that “Dimmer Switch” from my Cloud Cafe Podcast with Micheal Crandall the CEO of Rightscale.

Botchagalupe: Dude whatever, the point is that the enterprise will migrate into the cloud the same way they have always migrated into new technologies. They will use applications on the edge and once they get the warm on fuzzy on those they will move up the stack. I remember working with VMWare back in 1998 and now 10 years later it’s pervasive in the enterprise. It took a lot of trail and error and guerrilla projects to get VMWare accepted in the enterprise.

Johnmwillis: There has been a lot of discussion about security concerns and how the enterprise might not be ready for the cloud. Are there enterprise companies using the cloud today?

Botchagalupe: There is an under the radar groundswell of enterprises activity in the cloud. Wall Street companies are begging for advice on which applications should go to the cloud first. GigiaSpaces, well positioned in the financial services space. has recently put their application on EC2. It’s only a matter of time before their customers start using the cloud.

Johnmwillis: Then why are we not hearing about the large enterprises in the cloud.

Botchagalupe: Dude, sometimes I wonder about you. Of course the large enterprise are not going to broadcast their use of the clouds. I have been at some large companies that won’t even let you take a picture of their building. Do you think they are going to give competitors and hackers the blue prints to where their applications are running. A lot of the vendors and customers that I have talked to tell me that the enterprise is definitely using the cloud.

Johnmwillis: What is the enterprise doing in the cloud?

Botchagalupe: In the enterprise there seems to be an “Ask-for-forgiveness-later” kind of attitude happening when it comes to emerging technologies. Administrators seem to be deciding to go outside the firewall and pull out their own credit cards when it comes to getting tasks done rather than waiting on internal resource provisioning.

Johnmwillis: Yea but can you give me an example.

Botchagalupe: The classic example of this kind of attitude, although not a cloud initiative, is the Blue Shirt Nation (BSN) dude Gary Koelling of Best Buy. Koeling was in advertising at Best Buy and was going to each local Best Buy store to talk to different sales associates to get their feedback. He and and BSN co-founder Steve Bendt pulled out thier own credit card and spent $100 for a domain outside of the firewall and installed Drupal. Now 20k sales associates latter Best Buy senior management is being heralded by the industry as social networking innovators.
Johnmwillis: How about a cloud example?

Botchagalupe: Probably the best known cloud story is of Derek Gottfrid of the NY Times. Gottfrid was tasked with converting 11 million old TIFF format scanned articles from 1851 to 1922. Gottfrid had already been playing outside the firewall with S3 and decided to pull out his own credit card and give it a crack on EC2. Two hundred and forty dollars latter he had converted over 4 Terabytes of TIFF files into PDFs. He wound up using 100 EC2 AMI instances to accomplish the task. I am guessing he decided $240 dollars of his own money was worth it versus the headaches he would have encountered trying to request inside the firewall provisioning.

Johnmwillis: That’s a great story; however, everyone has heard that one already. Who else?

Botchagalupe: I was recently told a story about a large Telco that plans on moving their customer support help desk software over to EC2 in order to provide better agility and delivery to their customers. Unfortunately I can’t disclose the customer nor the vendor. Let me just say it is one of the top customer support software products on the market and it is a huge US based Telco.

Johnmwillis: Gartner claims …

Botchagalupe: Dude Gartner? Gartner Smrtner, don’t let the analysts of the world fool you. Insurance companies, banks, and pharmaceuticals that traditionally have an insatiable appetite for computing resources are experimenting with the cloud. I have heard stories of EC2 being used for insurance claim analysis. Analytics, modeling and Monte Carlo simulations are natural fits for clouds.

Johnmwillis: Are there any other documented cases where the enterprise is using the cloud?

Botchagalupe: Yea, yeah, sure, sure. Rightscale is helping ESPN with the cloud. Joyent has helped Major League Baseball get on the cloud. Nasdaq is even using the cloud.

Johnmwillis: What about inside the firewall cloud activity or what some call a fog.

Botchagalupe: Dude, a Fog? Anyway, if you look at 3Tera they are leading the way for private clouds. One of their big customer’s is British Telecom. JP Rangaswami, the CIO of BT, has been a huge advocate of emerging and disruptive technologies. Rangaswami is a CIO who not only blogs, but he communicates on twitter and Facebook. How cool is that? More than 10k BT employees are on Facebook. Nearly 16k of BT employees use a Wiki. It;s no wonder that they would be using 3Tera as a private cloud.
Johnmwillis: Wow, Botchagalupe … again you never disappoint my friend.

Botchagalupe: Yea, yeah, sure, sure.

Topics: 3tera, amazon, botchanomics, cloud computing, other, rightscale | No Comments »

Dumb “Corporate” Criminals

By John | July 12, 2008

We have all seen the clips on TV about dumb criminals. The guy who tries to rob a bank using the drive through window. How about the guys that try to rob a video camera store that has live cameras from every conceivable angle. There were two teenagers who tried to rob a police station - “A Police Station.” They actually handed the police receptionist a note that said give us all your money. There was also a burglar who fell a sleep in his getaway car in the driveway of the house he was robbing.

Well boys step aside for Atul Malhotra a former IBM sales director who was nabbed for stealing trade secrets from IBM. Malhorta worked for IBM in Armonk for almost 10 years before he took a VP postilion with HP in Palo Alto, About two weeks before Malhorta left IBM he asked for, via email, a report of confidential IBM product costs and materials. I guess he figured they wouldn’t notice even thought he was gong to work for one of IBM’s fiercest competitors. In fact he was specifically warned that the data was not to be distributed. Then when this idiot gets to HP he sends an unsolicited email, titled “For Your Eyes Only - Confidential”, to his superiors with the attached confidential data. He goes on in the email explaining that the data will give HP’s an edge over IBM. The good news is that HP, no stranger to corporate scandle, did the right thing by firing the idiot and handing the matter over to police. Not that I condone corporate espionage; however, I think there are some juicy takeaways from this story:

Molhorta pleaded nolo contendere and faces 10 years in prison. Maybe he can get a cell with those idiots who tried to rob the police station and they can all work on their next big caper together.

It is only by dealing honestly and fairly in all things that real success is attainable.

George H. Mead

Topics: hp, ibm | 1 Comment »

Elasticfox vs Jollat

By John | July 11, 2008

I noticed a new AWS tool for managing EC2 and S3 on the AWS blog called Jollat. I did a quick analysis of the differences between Jollat and ElasticFox and here is a quick list of the plus and minus’ of Jollat:

Plus:

Minus:

Bottom Line:

If you do a lot of work with multiple AWS accounts and need to filter between a lot of different EC2 images then the $66 is probably a good investment. However they need to get the copy feature in ASAP.

Topics: amazon, ec2, s3 | 2 Comments »

Johnson Controls and Tivoli Monitoring Energy Management

By John | July 11, 2008

Johnson Controls and IBM Develop Software Solution to Help Data Center Management

Johnson Controls, Inc., the global leader in creating smart environments, today announced plans to integrate IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Energy Management software to help make data centers more energy efficient and sustainable.

Topics: ibm | No Comments »

Classification of Cloud Computing Stakeholders

By John | July 10, 2008

Some great diagrams that Identify some of the SaaS,  PaaS, and PaaS players.

Classification of Cloud Computing Stakeholders

…

Topics: cloud computing | No Comments »

HP Clouds - If IBM Can Do It Why Can’t We?

By John | July 10, 2008

Here’s the scenario: You are huge hardware/software vendor and you need to re-brand your traditional hardware, software, and professional services line. You go out and find a large gullible organization that has lot’s of cash and offer to sell them this new cloud thing. You tell them it is the latest and greatest new thing and that everyone is doing it. Basically you sell them the same overpriced hardware, fat proprietary software and services solution that you were trying to sell last year. However, instead of calling it provisioning, orchestration, and an operations management solution, this year you call it a cloud. IBM has been hugely successful with this as a global strategy and particularly with the Chinese government. The issue at hand is that it has become a lot harder to sell hardware and fat proprietary software combos in a world where pesky open source solutions keep driving down the prices.

So it looks like HP has one-upped IBM by playing the cloud card with the US government. HP announced today that they will be helping the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) DISA move to a new cloud infrastructure. HP will be backing up it’s freight trucks to the DISA loading dock and will unload an army of services architects, project managers, grunts along with crates of hardware and software. In HP’s own words here is what DISA is going to get:

HP will provide DISA a broad array of HP products, software and services to implement and support the cloud infrastructure. HP software featured in the solution includes HP Operations Orchestration, HP Server Automation, HP Service Manager, HP Operations Manager, HP Systems Insight Manager and HP ProLiant Essentials. HP will also provide ProLiant server blades, implementation services and on-site operations management.

One can only wonder if the forecast will be calling for rain in a year from now when DISA tries to untangle their new cloud infrastructure.

Topics: cloud computing, hp, ibm, ibm blue cloud | 4 Comments »

IT Management Podcast #015 - Training, myCMDB, Grounded Clouds

By John | July 10, 2008

IT Management Podcast #015

…

Topics: itmanagementguys | No Comments »

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