Continuing my coverage of last week's Data Center Conference 2009, I attended another "User Experience" that was very well received. This time, it was Henry Sienkiewicz of the Department Information Systems Agency (DISA) presenting a real-world example of the business model behind a private cloud implementation. DISA is the US government agency that develops and runs software for the Army, Navy and Air Force.

Being part of the military presents its own unique set of challenges:

• Acquisition of hardware to develop and test software is difficult
• Budgets fluctuate so an elastic pay-for-use was desirable
• End user access had to be secure and meet government regulations
• It had to meet the technical aspects of scalable, elastic, dynamic, multi-tenant using shared resources

Using Cloud Computing simplifies provisioning, encourages the use of standards, and provides self-service. DISA has several solutions.

Rapid Access Computing Environment (RACE)

RACE is an internal private cloud with 24-hour provisioning for development and test requests, and 72 hour provisioning for production requests. The amount used is billed on a month-to-month basis, and offers a self-service portal so that developers and administrators can just pick and choose what they need. The result is a hosted server, similar to what you get from 1and1.com or GoDaddy.

Global Content Delivery Service (GCDS)

This provides long-term storage of data. An internal version of "Cloud Storage" for archive and fixed content.

Forge.Mil

This provides a place to maintain source code, basically their internal version of "SourceForge" used by Open Source projects.

In their traditional approach, a software project would take six months to procure the hardware, another 6-12 months code and test, and then another 6 months in certification, for a total of 18-24 months. With the new Cloud Computing approach that DISA adopted, procurement was down to 24-72 hours with RACE, code test took only 2-6 months with Forge.Mil, and certification could be done in days on RACE, resulting in a new total of only 3-6 months. Some challenges they found:

• Service Level management and continuing the use of ITIL best practices
• Balancing Military-level Security with Self-service Usability
• Internal Funding and Chargeback, they had even adopted a way for developers to pay with their credit card
• Cultural inertia, developers don't like to change or do things in a different way
• Controlling expectations

Some lessons learned from this two-year experience:

• It's a journey. Most of the user experiences for cloud adoption took two or more years to complete
• Infrastructure Fundamentals continue to matter
• Know your "marketplace", in this case, software development for military applications
• Engage in your end-users early. In this case, Henry had wished he had involved input from software developers that would be using RACE, GCDS and Forge.MIL earlier in the process.
• Return on Value analysis, this is different than Return on Investment, as many of the benefits of cloud like higher morale are intangible at first
• Avoid fixed costs in negotiations with vendors. For example, he cited they use a lot of IBM because of IBM's pay-for-use billing model. They pay for MIPS used on IBM mainframes, and their IBM Tivoli software pricing is usage-based.

technorati tags: , DISA, RACE, ITIL, GCDS, Henry Sienkiewicz, IBM, MIPS, mainframe, FORGE.Mil

Tags:  itil disa forge.mil race mips gcds ibm henry+sienkiewicz mainframe