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Day3 Success Stories
Visits (16812)
Continuing my coverage of the 30th annual [Data Center Conference]. here is a recap of Wednesday breakout sessions.
While some companies are still arguing over whether to implement a private cloud, an archive retention policy, or 10Gb Ethernet, other companies have shown great success moving forward!
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#oow11 Oracle OpenWorld Day 4 Oracle Announcements
Visits (15759)
The last keynote session of the [Oracle OpenWorld 2011] conference was Oracle making a few major announcements. Steve Miranda, Senior VP for Oracle Applications, explained the new "Fusion 11g Apps" which are now generally available. Basically, they took all the scattered applications they have from acquisitions of PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel and so on, and re-wrote them to industry-standard Java so that they would all run either on-premise or in the Cloud. The Enterprise Apps come in seven categories: Financials like General Ledger and Payroll; Human Capital Management (HCM) formerly known as Human Resources; Supply Chain Management (SCM); Customer Relationship Management (CRM); Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC); Procurement; and Project/Portfolio Management (PPM). Oracle also has "Industry Apps" for specific verticals. All of these apps have "embedded BI" (business intelligence), such as dashboards, multi-dimensional calculations, decision support, and real-time optimization. This is intended to help the end-user answer four questions:
Larry Ellison, Oracle CEO, said that it took six years to rewrite all the Fusion Apps. They used an "agile" development model with over 200 early adopters to ensure that these applications were successful. They were under a "controlled release program" but now that is over, and the applications are generally available. Larry indicates that these applications were developed under the concepts of Service Oriented Architecture [SOA], which neither Salesforce.com nor SAP R3 have. (This made me chuckle. SOA was initially developed by IBM and Microsoft, but is now industry standard. There is no reason not to develop software that isn't SOA.) Following the IBM model, Oracle has built-in the security at the OS, Database and Middleware layer, rather than in each application. As IBM has understood for several decades, a secure infrastructure is the way to go so that all applications are secure. With all these Fusion Apps now re-written so that they work on industry-standard Java (J2EE, actually), allowing them to run either on-premise or out on the Cloud, Larry Ellison said "I guess we need a Cloud!" This started his announcement of the "Oracle Public Cloud" [OPC]. OPC has both PaaS and SaaS. The PaaS would offer VM instances with support for database and Java services. The SaaS would be all the Fusion Apps rented on the "as-a-service" model. Rather than force everyone to Oracle 11g, you can run any Oracle database on OPC, and you can run any Java or J2EE application on the OPC. Your data is portable. Larry is pro-choice, and wants people to be able to move from any cloud to any cloud. Since it's based on industry-standard Java, applications can move seamlessly between OPC, Amazon EC2 and IBM SmartCloud. IBM has been a major force behind [Open Cloud Standards], so it is always good that other major vendors follow suit. He quoted [someone as saying "Beware of False Clouds"] This was Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff's attack against all "Private Cloud" IT vendors. Larry twisted this to say he agrees, "True Clouds" are based on open industry standards, and "False Clouds" are vendor-lockin. OPC is based on Java, J2EE, XML, BPEL and Ruby on Rails, whereas Salesforce.com is based on proprietary Heroku and APEX. He called Salesforce.com the "Roach Motel of Cloud Computing" .. you can check in, but you can't check out. OPC plans to offer some "data sources", including Dun&Bradstreet news feed, Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. It is based on a monthly subscription using a self-service portal. The resources are elastic, with capacity delivered on demand. He claims that Salesforce.com is rate-limited, and cancels long-running jobs if they are consuming too many resources. Larry said OPC would never do that. Larry said that there are private-only offerings like SAP R3, and public-only offerings like Salesforce.com, Workday, and Taleo, but Oracle instead has adopted the IBM model of supporting choice between private, public and hybrid clouds. Larry then attacked "Multi-tenancy", specifically, the idea that SaaS providers often use a single database instance, but then create a column to identify which records belong to which tenants. He said this was state-of-the-art 15 years ago, but is a bad idea now. Too risky. Instead, Larry's OPC has unique database instances for each tenant through virtualization. Larry also announced the Oracle Social Network (OSN). This is a corporate-version of Facebook, that supports collaboration and file-sharing, similar to IBM [LotusLive], Google Docs, or Microsoft Office365. All of the Fusion Apps are written to interface directly with the OSN or any of these other social networks through APIs. This includes navigation and integrated social networking. He also indicated that all Fusion Apps run on mobile devices. He showed the SAP R3 GUI, and said it reminded him of "the fins on a 1968 Cadillac!" Larry said that other CRM SaaS focus on helping sales managers track their employees, but Oracle's CRM helps sellers sell more. He then gave an example of a mythical sales manager Bob, and his sales employee Julian, selling two Exadata boxes for $4.8 Million USD. A "safe harbor" statement was shown at the beginning of this keynote, to make sure nobody asks to buy Exadata boxes this cheap.
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Japan and Northern Pacific - Three Months Free
Visits (13607)
IBM announced that it will offer [three free months of IBM Smart Business Cloud] computing and storage services to government agencies, charitable non-profit organizations, and other organizations involved with reconstruction resulting from the earthquakes and tsunami in Japan and the northern Pacific region. With traditional communications down, and many data centers incapacitated, Cloud Computing can be a great way to resume operations. According to the announcement, organizations can submit their requests now until April 30, and the program will run until July 31, 2011. Options include:
The offer also includes [LotusLive] Soft
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Day3 Mountains Hiding in the Mist
Visits (14753)
Continuing my coverage of the Data Center Conference 2009, held Dec 1-4 in Las Vegas, the title of this session refers to the mess of "management standards" for Cloud Computing.
The analyst quickly reviewed the concepts of IaaS (Amazon EC2, for example), PaaS (Microsoft Azure, for example), and SaaS (IBM LotusLive, for example). The problem is that each provider has developed their own set of APIs. (One exception was [Eucalyptus], which adopts the Amazon EC2, S3 and EBS style of interfaces. Eucalyptus is an open-source infrastrcture that stands for "Elastic Utility Computing Architecture Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems". You can build your own private cloud using the new Cloud APIs included Ubuntu Linux 9.10 Karmic Koala termed Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC). See these instructions in InformationWeek article [Roll Your Own Ubuntu Private Cloud].) The analyst went into specific Virtual Infrastructure (VI) and public cloud providers.
If you prefer a common management system independent of cloud provider, or perhaps across multiple cloud providers, you may want to consider one of the "Big 4" instead. These are the top four system management software vendors: IBM, HP, BMC Software, and Computer Associates (CA). A survey of the audience found the number one challenge was "integration". How to integrate new cloud services into an existing traditional data center. Who will give you confidence to deliver not tools for remote management of external cloud services? Survey shows:
Some final thoughts offered by the analyst. First, nearly a third of all IT vendors disappear after two years, and the cloud will probably have similar, if not worse, track record. Traditional server, storage and network administrators should not consider Cloud technologies as a death knell for in-house on-premises IT. Companies should probably explore a mix of private and public cloud options.
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