Last night at the Geek Whisperers meetup, John Troyer and I had a discussion around DevOps, The Phoenix Project, and how much of it was pertinent to Enterprise IT and “big harness” applications like SAP and Siebel where incremental releases aren’t possible. Most well-ran enterprises already have an existing release management methodology - the problem becomes ‘how do you implement more agile devops processes without compromising rigor?’ Trying to map large applications into a more agile release management system is almost destined to fail - rather it is necessary to insulate the “legacy enterprise crapplications” from agile releases, maintain separate release windows, and endeavor to take different release philosophies based on what makes sense.

Which was interesting to me, but not particularly post worthy - until I came across this post from Maish on the currently recommended VMware upgrade sequence. If you’re running your enterprise release schedule even weekly, you’re looking at 5-8 weeks for a full rollout if its supported to stagger the rollout (or increase the risk of the deployment and try to forklift all the components in one release window). Multiply that by the number of clusters and environments that you need to upgrade, and it becomes a fairly complicated exercise. I’m not picking on VMware- OpenStack and other large OSS platforms are equally difficult to upgrade. Complex software leads to complex upgrades.

Developing, testing, and implementing these upgrades takes a large amount of un-recoverable internal engineering hours - hours that could likely be used on more business-beneficial efforts. This shows the real value of converged, fully supported stacks such as Vblock - they manage the development, testing, and implementation of the stack that your business critical applications run on. This frees up internal resource time to focus on projects that provide a greater business benefit.

The benefit of Vblock over reference architectures such as VSPEX and Flexpod is a greater amount of testing, and greater familiarity the the actual configuration deployed. Many reference architectures require the VAR to perform the testing at a much smaller scale than VCE. How much risk is acceptable, even with reference architecture? Each enterprise needs to answer this on their own (and many still prefer the riskiest and most resource intensive model - rolling their own).

How does this tie back to release management and DevOps? It is a third mechanism to reduce the risk of upgrades / promotions to production.

A distinction that is commonly missed about IT-as-a-Service is that it is more about the delivery model than about the particulars of the technology. ITaaS is about making it as easy for internal business users to leverage inhouse IT services as it is for them to use externally hosted solutions. If a business unit feels they can get their needs met with an EC2 instance then they should be able to as easily request and use an internal instance - without the overhead of annual IT portfolio management, project management, and resource constraints.

Amazon EC2 instances are today’s version of MS Access databases on shared network drives.

With the recent release of the evasi0n jailbreak for iOS 6.x, I decided to do a little testing around the VMware View client on an iPad with the jailbreak tweak BTC Mouse & Trackpad. The process is fairly straightforward with the current version of iOS 6.x:

1. Download the evasi0n jailbreak and follow their instructions to jailbreak your device. Standard disclaimer - I’m not taking any responsibility if you somehow brick your device or it doesn’t work.
2. From the Cydia App Store, download the terminal emulator and change the root and mobile passwords from ‘alpine’ to something more unique. Not technically required for this test, but it is a good idea.
3. Purchase the app BTC Mouse & Trackpad from the Cydia App Store.
4. Go to the bluetooth settings on your iPad and connect your mouse and, optionally, keyboard. At this point, you should see a black mouse pointer on your iPad. While interesting, within iOS it isn’t particularly useful since iOS is really designed for use with fingers.

Prior to launching into your VMware View client, you’ll want to reconfigure right-clicking for VMware View. Under Settings, there is now a “Mouse” preference pane. Within that, select the option for two finger touch and enable it for VMware View. This will allow right mouse clicks to behave somewhat as expected in the virtual desktop - otherwise, right clicking the mouse will take you out of the client and back to the springboard.

At this point, everything is configured. The iPad has always been a lackluster VDI client due to the fact that desktops are geared towards precision pointing devices and not nubby fingers. Enabling bluetooth mouse use on the iPad makes the pointing situation better - however, it is still not perfect. There is no synchronization between the desktop pointer and the iPad pointer until you click, so you’ll normally see two mouse pointers. This isn’t as big of an issue as it seems since clicking and dragging works flawlessly. The other issue is that right clicking isn’t very precise. Since the bluetooth mouse is mimicing a double finger tap, the actual precision of the click is very good. But honestly, this does perform better than just using the VDI session with your fingers. I still don’t think the benefit is worth the risk of jailbreaking, but if you’re jailbreaking anyway, it isn’t a bad bonus.

Brilliant post from Rands today on Process and Engineers called The Process Myth:

“Engineers are creatures who appreciate structure, order and predictability, and the goal of a healthy process is to define structure so order is maintained and predictability is increased. The job of a software engineer is writing code, which is codified process.

So, what gives? Why the groaning?

Engineers don’t hate process. They hate process that can’t defend itself.”

Many sysadmins and developers harbor a fairly deep dislike of ITIL and related process work. The key thing to remember is that, if ITIL lived up to what it is supposed to deliver, most of the engineers would be on board. What keeps this level of buy-in from occurring are two typical implementation mistakes:

1. A lack of fully understanding the current pre-ITIL process and implementing ITIL in a way that it isn’t measurably and demonstrably better.
2. Not implementing ITIL to an extent that it is possible to get value from it. As said in VisibleOps: “the only acceptable number of unauthorized changes is zero.” Every group that is ‘exempt’ from authorization reduces the overall value of change control dramatically, as well as increases the likelihood of unexpected issues and the time to repair.

Chris Evans has a great post on XtremeIO and the product’s innovation post-acquisition by EMC.

“Each brick seems to be built to the standard dual controller architecture - two controllers with volatile cache, requiring battery backup in order to flush data in the event of a power failure. The DAE even seems to be the same as ones used elsewhere. Pretty much a typical design, like CLARiiON for instance. […] By comparison, a single “brick” from Whiptail delivers 250,000 random write I/Os at 0.1ms latency using 200W and 2U. I could go on and choose more examples (and to be fair, some of the details, such as I/O size and mixed workloads need to be normalised for comparison), however I’m not seeing a revolution in what EMC are offering, but rather a late-to-market product that falls behind the best of the competition.”

Innovation takes many forms… EMC’s strategy lately has been to converge hardware platforms as much as possible (see VNX / VMAX) to benefit from economies of scale and better margins. Their size already gives them an advantage relative to purchasing power and being able to negotiate smaller component prices.

Chris’s argument about their technology being inferior to startup’s might be correct. However, technology alone never seems to win in the marketplace (see VHS vs Betamax). The choices EMC seems to be making are to lower the cost while providing a solution ‘good enough’ for their customers. Thicker margins equate to the ability to discount heavier, which (in theory) would lead to market share. Additionally, business value is often a product of ‘good enough’ and ‘cheap enough’ - which appears to be what they’re targetting.

If you’ve been following Dave Henry, Matthew Brender, or Mark Browne on Twitter, you might have suspected that there was a game afoot. Today is the day that all the veiled tweets come into clear view.

EMC Elect. An EMC focused community of bloggers, social media types, and contributors on ECN that have been recognized by EMC as providing substantial value to the storage, security, and virtualization community.

A few people have been honored as EMC Elect founders, to help define and promote this designation. These people include such respected technologists as Dave Henry, Tommy Trogden, and Matthew Yeager. On the other end, it includes people like me who, I assume, provide comic relief and make everyone else look better :-).

In truth, this community brings out the best in people and makes everyone look better, regardless of their role.

Similar to the VMware vExpert and Microsoft MVP roles, EMC gains great insight into the community and word of mouth. The recipients get access to some excellent technical resources, briefings, and public acknowledgement of their contribution.

Nominations will be running for the next month and are available at http://emc.im/RWbRKF. The program’s page is available at http://emc.im/SHmsYV. I highly recommend you applying if you think you might meet the criteria.

I am deeply honored to be included in this opportunity, and proud to be a member of one of the most helpful and altruistic communities online.

1. Make sure that you and your loved ones are using some form of online backup to safeguard your personal data from loss. I personally recommend Mozy, but know many people who use BackBlaze or CrashPlan instead.
2. Use unique passwords for each online service and manage them with a password manager. I recommend 1Password or KeePass. A lot of people swear by LastPass.
3. If you use cloud storage such as DropBox, encrypt sensitive data using TrueCrypt.
4. If your email provider supports it, turn on 2-factor authentication. If it isn’t supported, switch to Google’s Gmail and turn it on.
5. Double check application permissions on your social networks and remove ones that you don’t actively use: Twitter, Facebook.
6. Install some form of AntiVirus / AntiMalware. For MS Windows, I recommend Microsoft Security Essentials.
7. Update Java, Adobe Reader, and Flash if they are installed.
8. Search for your email address on PasteBin to see if your account has been publicly compromised.
9. Add a strong PIN to your smartphone and enable any ‘find your phone’ features.
10. Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

FTC Disclosures: My family has won a “swag bag” consisting of two T-Shirts from Mozy. Also, while I have purchased 3 copies of 1Password (1 for Windows, 2 for iOS) I also received one license for free from Agilebits.

Simon Wardley, on IT Strategy:

“I was asked this question recently about a company’s IT strategy. Which bit was actually strategy? This is fairly easy to work out.

1. Take a company’s IT strategy.
2. Now remove any and all references to a choice of a specific vendor as these are purchasing decisions e.g. we will use SAP to …
3. Now remove any and all references to implementation details e.g. we will build a private cloud to…
4. Now remove any and all references to operational details e.g. we’ll improve our SLA’s and reporting times to…
5. Now remove any and all references to tactical choices e.g. we will invest in big data, BYOT (bring your own technology) and open source

What is left, is the IT strategy.”

A surprisingly high amount of IT organizations would have blank strategies after applying these five rules, especially IT organizations in companies whose core strength is not online (or IT related). Many IT organizations are still struggling with what value they provide outside of operations and ‘keeping the lights on.’

What Simon’s 5 questions really are is a litmus test to whether or not an organization went through the transformation to becoming a strategic differentiator in their corporation. Are they partnering closely with the business, or just maintaining the status quo? Chuck Hollis (EMC) wrote about the shift towards IT as a business enabler first in 2009 and many corporations still haven’t received that memo.

I find it particularly damning that most IT organizations write their own strategy statements. If IT doesn’t see themselves as a key differentiator, why would the business?

Ben Kepes’ post on IT Readiness and Innovator’s Dilemma made several great points around the state of Enterprise IT and the commoditization of VMware’s core server virtualization business. Since reading it almost two weeks ago, several things have stuck with me.

“The keynote in which it was announced held somewhere around 20000 people, arguably the cream of the IT world”

I chuckled at the ‘cream of the IT world’ statement. What I took away from VMworld this year is that, generally, the top 20% of IT people who are really thinking about large problems Enterprises face today I already knew from Twitter. Many people seemed more interested in incremental improvements to their current comfort zones than radically shifting IT to any different model. The number of conversations I heard between vendors and customers around taking so-called ‘cloud’ tools and making them respect silos was staggering.

It reminds me of the Game of Thrones. The bulk of the series is around the political machinations of several houses in a fictitious world, all fighting for prestige and land while evil threatening forces mass themselves out of sight. In similar ways, many organizations allow their IT to double down on silos to guard authority, influence, and headcount all the while technology advancements occur just outside the sight of most Enterprise IT shops. Ostriches don’t see lions.

With advancements in automation (Software Defined Blah), Cloud, and different operational models that leverage these (DevOps, NoOps), it is apparent that there will be a contraction of IT headcount, and that the role entirely is going to shift. How much of the entrenchment of silos is caused by this fear of change? Are typical IT leaders prioritizing comfort over cost, agility, and other benefits that would enable their companies to compete more aggressively in the marketplace?

Winter is coming. If IT organizations don’t align and partner effectively with the business and provide solutions that the business wants, they will be replaced - and the loss will be more than just some silos.

EMC recently released SPECsfs numbers for an all flash based VNX configuration. The Register summarizes it nicely:

“EMC has topped the SPEC NFS benchmark rankings, scoring 497,632 operations/sec, using virtually all-flash VNX arrays.

The previous top SPECsfs2008 NFS v3 score was 403,326 ops/sec from an IBM SONAS (Scale-Out NAS) system using 1,975 disk drives. There were 1,680 x 600GB and 240 x 450GB SAS hard drives and a total exported capacity of 903.8TB.”

As is typical, these types of results on a standardized benchmark incites commentary from all over the storage community. For comparison, I’ll link to two vendor blogger’s stances:

• Recovery Monkey [NetApp]: The far more accurate statement is “four separate VNXs working independently and utterly unaware of each other did 124,405 SPEC fs2008_nfs.v3 operations per second each”. All EMC did was add up the result of 4 boxes.
• The Storage Anarchist [EMC]: Remembering (as you must) that this is an artificial benchmark, run on entirely different hardware configurations with markedly different costs, and that the results bear no definitive corollary to any known real-world workload… can you answer this question: Which product is faster?

EMC is honest about this configuration not being something an average customer would run in their environment. Chad Sakac even admits that it is a total lab queen. But, big numbers (especially when they are on the top of the performance column) are threatening to all competitors, especially the ones who called out EMC’s lack of willingness to participate on standardized benchmarks previously.

Which, of course, is the point. EMC recently announced that they were joined the Storage Performance Council, in a move that was lauded by competitors as “about time.” The proper competitive response should have been “Oh Shit” and an across the board sharpening of their benchmark skills. I expect that any EMC SPC entries would be equally unrealistic and exceed the currently highest performant benchmark.

EMC has shown that they can cook a benchmark like non-other; exceed current performance records all while staying within the technical rules of the benchmark. Now, every time a competitor claims that EMC’s top-end benchmarked system is “non-real-world,” EMC is able to say, basically, “We’ve been saying for years that these benchmarks are worthless. Now that our competition finally agrees, let’s get down to what really matters.” The ability to take away a competitor’s talking points and shift the conversation to something beneficial to EMC is quite the coup.

EMC has spent years dodging SPC benchmarks with the company line of “they do not show real world performance in any meaningful way.” Does anyone really think the boys from Beantown would have a sudden change of heart unless they could completely dominate SPC from a performance standpoint?