Cameron Haight
Research VP
10 years at Gartner
30 years IT industry
Cameron Haight is a research vice president in Gartner Research. His primary research focus is on the management of server virtualization and emerging cloud computing environments. Included in this effort is… Read Full Bio
by Cameron Haight | April 7, 2010 | 3 Comments
With the topic of healthcare reform receiving much continued spirited debate, it’s time we turn to another area needing a new approach (and hopefully stimulating interesting debate in terms of approaches). We need to rethink how we manage the “health” of IT. It may in fact require some drastic “medicine” but in the long run the goal is to make IT service delivery not only more efficient, but effective.
Now, how did I get to this point? While some of my earlier posts have discussed issues with current IT operations tools and/or culture with respect to the support of emerging technology environments, it was my research over the past nine months trying to better understand how the major public cloud vendors deliver their products which ultimately convinced me of the need for a radically new approach for enterprise IT delivery. Adding to the chorus suggesting a change is needed is some of our own data here at Gartner showing that the IT process evolution is not maturing as rapidly as perhaps we would have thought (clients should refer to “The Current State of IT Infrastructure and Operations Maturity: Immature!”). At the end of the day, I believe that it is no longer tenable to simply layer an increasingly complex operations management tool, organization and process infrastructure on top of an already complex software and hardware foundation and to expect satisfying results. Management vendors that continue to think in this vein will I think face an increasingly critical challenge from IT technology suppliers that are not trapped in this conventional wisdom.
During this time, I’ve also managed to read the writings of some of those that have also been advocating for a new way of providing IT services. While I won’t say that I’m always in agreement, they often provide some unique perspectives so a hat tip needs to go out to (among others):
IT “reform” today is being couched with terms such as devops, agile operations, agile infrastructure, Lean IT as well as others that perhaps I’m not aware of. Their meanings are in many cases are still being defined, but semantics aside, at the heart of these initiatives are suggestions for taking a new look at how the operations (and even development) side of the IT equation needs to be re-constructed. The principles embodied in the agile manifesto originally conceived to improve software development seem to permeate many of the thought processes in this area although there is some disagreement of its applicability in an IT operations context. I like the agile construct though because it is focused first and foremost on people (i.e., individuals and interactions over processes and tools) who at the end of the day are the most valuable components within the IT service delivery system.
We have spent the better part of the past decade focusing on process effectiveness, when perhaps in hindsight, we should have spent more time focusing on listening to our employees – systems administrators, system engineers, console operators, application support teams, i.e., the people often on the front line in the IT operations war room. The industry is abuzz with the lack of enterprise IT innovation, but we may have only ourselves to blame because we have seemingly “dumbed down” many of our key personnel by making them fit into one of the many ITIL-like process “boxes” rather than letting them collectively develop a better solution – as many of the major cloud vendors do using approaches such as Amazon’s “two pizza” teams, etc. We have often given voice to the be rid of the “fireman” mentality even though it is likely that individual that probably can find a better way to do whatever it is to be done. The “hacker” mantra is alive and well in the agile development world but within IT operations we shy away from this because it is potentially too disruptive (think change management). But that’s where an effective infrastructure design comes in to play providing a synergistic base to an agile organization. I’m not saying to do away with operations processes in a wholesale fashion, but rather be more selective in which ones will provide the highest value and focus on optimizing these (significantly fewer) disciplines. I’ll be blogging more on this concept (which I am referring to as XOps internally) over the next few months as well as developing Gartner-oriented research for our clients. Look for the first presentation on this topic at our upcoming Infrastructure Operations and Management Conference in Orlando in June.
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by Cameron Haight | March 9, 2010 | 3 Comments
Every month I meet with a group of Gartner clients to discuss the challenges (and benefits) that they are receiving as a consequence of investing in server virtualization technology. At our February meeting, the item on the agenda was performance management. I took the liberty of presenting to the group a polling question:
From what part of the virtual server infrastructure have most of your performance problems originated (note: the numbers sum to less than 100% due to rounding)?
- Individual VMs – 42%
- Host server (i.e., ESX) – 21%
- Cluster – 0%
- SAN/storage – 26%
- Network – 0%
- Other – 0%
- We have had no performance problems (10%)
Now, only 19 firms responded so let’s not go and make any hasty strategy changes. Still, I was somewhat struck by the answers as I had assumed that no.4 (SAN/storage) would have been the primary issue as that is often what I hear (and no, it’s probably not due to the SAN itself, but the decisions relating to the number of VMs per HBA, VMs per LUN, VM swapping, etc.). Interestingly, what I heard were some comments along the lines of while the initial finger pointing was towards the virtual infrastructure, it was often found to actually be an application problem (i.e., misbehaving Java program). It’s harder to fix code than to change a configuration parameter, so the onus was usually always first on the virtualization administrator.
As I thought some more about this, it reminded me of what I saw when I covered Java management years back. A client would complain about poor response and would assume it was a database problem (since it seemed to be the component that was over utilized), but it sometimes turned out to be a poorly coded application (what sticks in my mind is the example of a single URL request resulting in many SQL queries). So, perhaps a case of the more things change, the more they stay the same.
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by Cameron Haight | December 15, 2009 | 1 Comment
Earlier this week, Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels announced the availability of spot- (or market-) based Amazon EC2 instance pricing. In essence, a customer would bid a price and as long as the bid exceeds the spot price (and they only pay the spot price), their instances would run. Once the spot price exceeded the bid price, the instances would terminate thus necessitating that the applications running in the Amazon cloud be able to frequently save their state. A spot pricing history would be available via the Amazon AWS management console to presumably help with bidding. This is something that is close to what I predicted in an earlier blog post where I discussed how cloud providers might deal with excess capacity. Is the theorized future’s exchange now not that far off into the future?
But this leads us to another area of discussion – how will IT operations be able to leverage this? We’re still dealing with a great deal of uncertainty about how much services cost to run and support within the current enterprise infrastructure. Now we have a mechanism to potentially set our price, but upon what basis will we know if our bid is actually “profitable” for us or not? As I speculated in my earlier post, I see an enhanced role for information gathering and analytical tools to help IT determine optimal pricing in the cloud world. Is an operations-centric “Bloomberg” terminal providing cost and other relevant cloud service provider information (such as QoS) in our collective futures?
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by Cameron Haight | October 25, 2009 | 10 Comments
Yes – Aperations, not apparitions as Google tried to correct me when I checked to see if the term had been used previously although this blog post may be a bit spooky to some (had to thrown in the seasonal tie – sorry). I’ve been mulling this concept for awhile and the thinking begins along the following line – we all know the story about applications getting more and more complex due to the growing number of interdependencies as well as the increasing degree of loose coupling and dynamic binding found in newer application architectures. Yet we persist with an organizational alignment that in my mind doesn’t act to counter these attributes, i.e., the familiar pattern of development (and application support), test (and staging) and then of course, operations.
Years ago when I covered application management and saw the rise of J2EE-based applications, I was initially surprised that my client inquiries for tools and best practices with regards to Java management were coming from development and application support teams. It was déjà vu all over again with SOA. Today, of course, we have REST, EDA (Event-driven Architecture), CoDA (Context Delivery Architecture) and other application paradigms that just seem to add fuel to the proverbial management challenge fire. And why were application developers calling and not traditional IT operations? Well, the latter weren’t sufficiently skilled in terms of support at the time, and this can still be true today – especially for these emerging application types.
So the thought is this … quit fighting natural selection. Developers (or application owners) know more about the application than others within IT so they should be the rightful management owners as well. I’m not talking about traditional level 3 style activity, but ALL management. I know the argument against this which is that an expensive resource like a developer should focus on their core competency and only be engaged with problems at the last possible moment, but I ask you the reader, how successful has this posture been? We throw applications over the wall to operations and somehow we hope that those less knowledgeable about the architecture will sometime in the future be able to management it effectively. This is not a criticism of IT operations capabilities because they are already extremely busy having to deal with substantial infrastructure change in the form of virtualization, cloud computing, etc.
And speaking of cloud computing, for some cloud and Internet services providers this wouldn’t seem so unusual as some already require heavy instrumentation of their applications and operate under the mantra of “you built it, you manage it (see On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services).” They (as does Gartner) believe also that most operations-related issues have their origin in pre-production (note: the research paper by James Hamilton has many other valuable lessons in it that I’ll return to periodically). For me, the question isn’t so much should application development assume management ownership, but “how low should they go?” The recent acquisition of SpringSource by VMware I think will further blur the line between infrastructure and applications adding even more impetus to a re-evaluation of how we’re currently structured within IT. So, let the debate begin.
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by Cameron Haight | August 19, 2009 | 4 Comments
…. as I was saying (back in March) … okay, sorry, I’ve been less than a bit regular on posting, but once more I go into the breech. Why the play on words? One of the things that I have focused on in this blog as well as in my career at Gartner is innovation (or the lack thereof) in the operations management realm. So when something appears at least somewhat unconventional, I’d like to point it out. The folks at GroundWork Open Source are going to include what they call a “Seurat View” in version 6.0 of their GroundWork Monitor (see here). My wife was an art major, so I happened to know that Georges-Pierre Seurat was a French neo-impressionist artist credited with a painting technique known as pointillism (think painting with dots). It takes advantage of how we see and process images to essentially enrich the picture (that part I didn’t remember – thank you Wikipedia). Now, what GroundWork has done is not Seurat’s technique per se, but they’re onto clearly one of the problems in today’s increasingly virtual environments and that is how can we display information in a meaningful way for a large number of managed objects? Traditional tree- and topology-style views just don’t seem appropriate for a dynamic, virtual environment, let along one that may soon expand into the cloud world. Another initiative that looks interesting is PixlCloud. They’re building a SaaS-based visualization service. Could a future management tool take advantage of something like this? I don’t know the founder, Raffael Marty, but I have pointed out before some of the visualization techniques that he’s been involved with in terms of security visualization. If anyone else has any pointers to interesting visualization techniques that might be appropriate for the management space, please feel free to let me know.
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by Cameron Haight | March 9, 2009 | 1 Comment
I guess we will see. Mantissa Corporation announced last week their intention to provide support for Windows desktops on IBM mainframes. This is, of course, does not require a total stretch of the imagination as Linux has run on the mainframe for years. But this is, I believe, a first for Windows, and especially, Windows-based desktops. Little is known of how this will be done … and the potential impact this will have on mainframe resources.
[Danger: I'm about to show my age] I remember years ago when I was at IBM trying to enable a port of the DEC VT-100 protocol to an IBM 3090 class mainframe for one of my clients (we were trying to dislodge those pesky, from our perspective, DEC/SNA gateways). Can you say performance problem? We did the right thing and ultimately canceled the project but I’m sure some of the sales folks looked wistfully upon the lost mainframe cycles that might have been sold. I share this though as an example that there are certain environments that don’t blend well with mainframe architectures.
But for the moment, let’s assume the overhead is manageable and that there are no issues with remote protocols, etc. Is the mainframe the right place to do this? While still expensive in nominal terms, the latest z10 IBM server and associated specialty engines (IFL, zAAP and zIIP) seem to be changing many traditional notions about mainframe costs (and capabilities). I seem to recall studies suggesting that power consumption may also be increasingly a winning argument for mainframes. And of course when it comes to security, the mainframe is often the bar that other systems alternatives aim for.
So, there may be a plausible case for this – at least among existing mainframe customers. Still I am concerned about one thing that in my traditional virtualization coverage I heavily focus upon – support (and related to this, complexity). It’s no secret that skills availability for mainframe support is starting to become an issue as many of these traditional administrators near retirement age. And of course, even with skilled operators the mainframe can be complex to manage – although managing a distributed UNIX or Windows server farm isn’t necessarily for the faint of heart either. All-in-all, it’s an interesting announcement and we’ll have to continue to monitor Mantissa’s progress.
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by Cameron Haight | February 25, 2009 | Comments Off
Good comments by my colleague Tom Bittman on the recent Citrix and Microsoft news. What’s interesting to me though is the now strategic emphasis on management technology by Citrix. And of course Microsoft continues to invest in System Center and VMware in vCenter and other management add-ons. As hypervisor platform commoditization grows, where will these vendors head? Certainly one arc is management. But the last time I checked there were some already (very) large players in this space. Admittedly the activities of the “Big Four” (BMC, CA, HP and IBM) in the virtualization arena are still works-in-progress, but they (and other management suppliers) also see the opportunity. The virtualization providers and traditional management firms of course are all trying to find ways to work together, but how long will it be before everyone wants to own much of the same turf? Like automation and workflow orchestration? Or capacity planning (what we are now calling ITRP or IT Resource Planning at Gartner)? What about provisioning? There are multiple levels of these functions so large scale direct conflict is still likely in the future. But then we have to ask is this likely to repeat itself all over again in the cloud computing world? The potentially good news for management consumers is that as a result we may see not only lower costs, but maybe, just maybe, more innovation as a consequence of heightened competition.
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by Cameron Haight | February 21, 2009 | Comments Off
From WWW to WWC? I first came across this term here in Reuven Cohen’s Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum and its proposed Unified Cloud Interface or UCI (I’ll focus more on the issues of standardization in a subsequent post because it’s of importance to my management focus). Cohen used this term in relation to SOASTA’s CloudTest offering, and specifically I believe, to this posting by SOASTA’s Tom Lounibos describing what they call “global load and performance tests.” It’s an interesting capability that bears its own further review, but again I’m drawn to the term World Wide Cloud and it’s potential ramifications. In today’s WWW-based world, I can use URLs to seamlessly consume content across multiple web providers. The term World Wide Cloud, to me at least, presages something similar but this time the “content” or consumed resources are obviously not traditional objects, but compute and storage resources. This gets a little bit closer to that concept using it appears the OpenNebula virtualization platform. Now the question is – how do you manage all of this? Still, as Spock would say, fascinating.
Category: Cloud management Tags: cloud computing
by Cameron Haight | February 20, 2009 | Comments Off
As we’ve observed from the major virtualization platform providers, we are now starting to see more cost and TCO calculators for cloud computing. Amazon has had one for awhile. Here’s another that compares Amazon to an on premises solution. This tool appears to be a generic SaaS versus on premise evaluator. Rackspace/Mosso seems to have developed a calculator comparing their Cloud Files enabled with Limelight’s CDN with Amazon’s S3 and CloudFront. I’m sure more of these will arise. Key is of course to a) fully know of any underlying assumptions and b) ensure that in any comparative analysis, an apples-to-apples approach is being used. I’ll be on the hunt for more of these but feel free to let me know if you stumble across any others.
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by Cameron Haight | February 16, 2009 | 1 Comment
I just came across an interesting paper on a VMware project called PARDA. The acronym stands for Proportional Allocation of Resources for Distributed Storage Access and represents an attempt to potentially deal with increasing virtualization I/O concerns using a "proportional-share resource scheduler that can provide service differentiation for I/O like VMware already provides for CPU and Memory." Interesting charts that show that the target is to address latency and not necessarily bandwidth. While many clients that I speak to suggest that they focus most on memory in terms of costs, they also cite that from a performance standpoint they often concentrate primarily on storage I/O so this could very interesting. It does though seem to potentially create an interesting scenario for virtualization consumers, i.e.,., do I use a common VM-oriented I/O scheduler that is seemingly independent of the back-end storage, or do I use array-based service controlling mechanisms that may be independent of the underlying VM technology platform?
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