IT shops deploying clouds over the past year have been focused on Infrastructure as a Service ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrastructure_as_a_service#Infrastructure ) as a way to drive speed in virtual and physical server provisioning, cost savings in operations, proactive service level agreements, and increased control and governance.   In one of my blogs I introduced our Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud http://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/the-secret-is-now-out-you-can-simplify-cloud-deployments-with-cisco-unified-management/ and how that addresses both private, hybrid and public clouds IaaS.   Key to this is the service catalog and self service portal.  Moving to cloud is NOT about taking hundreds of server configuration templates and moving to them immediate self service.  All you are doing in that model is automating VM sprawl.  They key is defining a limited set of services and options that your end users such as application owners and technical folks can order through a self service portal and manage their life-cycle.

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Tags: automated provisioning, Cisco CloudVerse, Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud, cloud, data center, data center provisioning, IaaS, intelligent automation, orchestration, private cloud, Public Cloud, self-service

Cloud Expo was indeed a very interesting juxtaposition of people espousing the value of cloud and how their stuff is really cloudy.  You have a group of presenters and expo floor booths talking about their open API and how that is the future of cloud.  Then you have the other camp that tells us how their special mix of functions is so much better than that.   All of this is a very interesting dialog.  APIs are indeed very important.  If your technology is indeed a cloud operating model then you must have an API.   Solutions like Cisco’s Intelligent Automation for Cloud rely on those APIs to orchestrate cloud services.   But APIs are not the end all.   The reality is that while the cloud discussions tend to center on the API and the model behind that API, the real change enabling the move towards cloud is the operating model of the users who are leveraging the cloud for a completely fresh game plan for their businesses.

James Urquhart’s recent blog:   http://gigaom.com/cloud/what-cloud-boils-down-to-for-the-enterprise-2/ highlights that the real change for users of the cloud is modifying how they do development, test, capacity management, production operations and disaster recovery.  My last blog talked about the world before cloud management and automation and the move from the old world model to the new models of dev/test or dev/ops that force the application architects, developers, and QA folks to radically alter  their model.   Those that adopt the cloud without changing their “software factory” model from one that Henry Ford would recognize to the new models may not get the value they are looking for out of the cloud.

At Cloud Expo I saw a lot of very interesting software packages.   Some of them went really deep into a specific use case area, while others accomplished a lot of functional use cases that were only about a inch deep.   As product teams build out software packages for commercial use, they have a very interesting and critical decision point that will drive the value proposition of the software product.  It seems to me that within 2 years, just about all entrants in the cloud management and automation marathon will begin to converge on a simple focused yet broad set of use cases.   Each competitor will be either directly driving their product to that point, or they will be forced to that spot by the practical aspects of customers voting with the wallets.  Interestingly enough, this whole process it drives competition and will yield great value for the VP of Operations and VP of Applications of companies moving their applications to the cloud.

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Tags: API, application, automated provisioning, cloud, data center provisioning, devops, devtest, intelligent automation, monitoring, private cloud, service assurance

Early in my career I moved quite a bit, new job, growing family, whatever the reason it seemed like every two or three years we were packing up and going to a new place and meeting our new neighbors.

Each new place had its own protocol for getting to know the neighbors, sometimes they came to us other times we had to walk around the block with the kids in tow to make that connection. The benefits of knowing your neighbors are many, who’ll lend you tools, who will help move furniture, etc.

Knowing the device neighbors in you network is just as important and fortunately there is a protocol for that, Cisco Discovery Protocol Cisco Discovery Protocol.  This article is a guide to getting to know your UCS Fabric Interconnects’ neighbors in a manual and automated way.

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Tags: application, automated provisioning, cloud, devops, devtest, expect, intelligent automation, server provisioning, TCL

Earlier in my career, I ran a corporate IT and managed services tooling team.   I wish it was garage type tools, but it was IT operational management tools.   My team was responsible for developing and integration a set of ~20 applications that was the “IT for the IT guys”.  It was a great training ground for 120 of us; we worked on the bleeding edge and we were loving it.   We did everything from product management, development, test, quality engineering deployment, production and operational support.  It was indeed an example of eating your own cooking.  Applications where king in our group.  We had .NET, J2EE, JAVA, C, C+, C++ and other languages.  We have custom build and COTS (commercial off the shelf) software applications.

One day on a fateful Friday, my  teenagers happily asleep on a Friday night way past midnight (I guess that made it Saturday), I was biting my nails at 2 AM with my management and technical  team on a concall wondering what went wrong.  We were 5 hours into a major yearly upgrade and Murphy was my co-pilot that night.  I had DBAs, architects, Tomcat experts, QA, load testing gurus, infrastructure jockeys, and everyone else on the phone.  We had deployed 10 new servers that night and were simultaneously doing an upgrade to the software stack.  I think we had 7 time zones covered with our concall.   At least for my compatriots in France it was not too bad; they were having morning coffee in their time zone.  Our composite application was taking 12 seconds to process transactions; it should have taken no more 1.5 secs.    The big question:  can we fix this by Sun at 10 PM when our user base in EMEA showed up for work, or do we (don’t say this to the management)  roll back the systems and application….  I ran out of nails at this point….  My wife came into my dark home office and wondered what the heck was going on…..

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Tags: application, automated provisioning, cloud, devops, devtest, intelligent automation, orchestration, server provisioning

Captain’s log, October 27, 2011:

The USS Cisco took off for the Gestalt IT Networking Tech Field Day 2 with Captain Omar Sultan (see picture below, courtesy of techfieldday.com), Data Center Solutions Sr. Marketing Manager, at the helm. Tech Field Day networking industry experts gathered on the bridge, cleverly disguised as the Cisco Cloud Innovation Center (CICC) Lab, for an informal, no-holds-barred conversation on recent Nexus portfolio announcements, the continued march towards automated provisioning of cloud services and ever-evolving VM networking technologies.

Captain Omar at Cisco Networking Tech Field Day 2

For those who weren’t at the event or haven’t seen the video recording yet, please excuse my unabashed geekiness, but you’ll have to watch the first minute of the video to get the above reference. As a new member of the Data Center Solutions Marketing team, this is also my first foray into the Cisco blog-o-sphere, so I hope to share some fresh viewpoints on the day’s events.

Several things were made very apparent during the Tech Field Day session:

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Tags: automated provisioning, brighttalk, CIAC, cicc, Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud, cloud, han yang, networking tech field day, Nexus 1000v, Nexus 3000, Nexus 5000, Nexus 7000, omar sultan, orchestration, tech field day, Tina Feng, virtual machine networking, virtual services, virtualization insights, vm networking, VXLAN