The cloud based university - Day 1

This is my first attempt to blog from a conference so it might contain various errors and so on. But I have tried to capture some key points and observations but naturally I haven't tried to capture everything.

The discussions kicked off with a heated debate on different clouds, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. I have blogged about this earlier, see The cloud - some definitions.

A first observation some in the audience made is that the internal IT organizations often are outpaced by vendors and customers. The internal IT organization is simply too slow to provide and adopt new services. Especially when it comes to new services like Dropbox etc.

Per Sedihn from Proact and SNIA talked about storage in the cloud or perhaps it should be called DaaS - Data Storage as a Service.

A key point was that the user must be able to do self provisioning of storage and virtual servers and more. And naturally only pay for the resources the user uses. The service ordered must be available almost instantly. The user doesn't accept a waiting time of days or even hours. An acceptable time is perhaps only minutes.

Obstacles against cloud services are emotions, legal issues, SLAs and perhaps more important control.

"Internal clouds is built by internal IT organization that has been around for a while". The argument is that it is more likely that a traditional (older) IT organization builds an internal cloud rather than use a "public"  cloud. As an observation most seem to define a public cloud as something provided by someone else.

A good idea is likely to outsource (move to the cloud) things you do well and not things you do bad. Infrastructure or highly standardized services is perhaps a good place to start.

What is the acceptable price for storage? Is it the same price as can be obtained by buying an external sata disk?

• http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/
• http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/pricing/
• http://www.rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/files/pricing/

But the long term largest cost for cloud services is integration! If you have a lot of different islands of clouds you likely need integrate them. The users probably expect the services to integrate to some extent.

The old file protocols (like CIFS, NFS) should perhaps be replaced by things like HTTP (REST etc..) or some sort of hybrid web protocols.

Some very interesting numbers for storage:

• A few % was only written to disk
• 7-8 % was read only once after creation
• 1 % is read frequently

Microsoft

Microsoft has several different offers. Amongst them are

• Microsoft CRM online
• Intune
• Windows Azure Platform
• Office 365

One of the things that unify different clouds and solutions are Identity management. So a good identity management is key for any organization.

An interesting option to the cloud is the Azure appliance. It is basically the Azure platform but sold as a physical container that is installed locally.

But perhaps the cloud should be called:

IT as a Service - Helps you deliver! 

WMware

WMwares primary idea has been to decrease cost and increase agility when it comes to servers.

Reason why users round internal IT and go to public cloud services:

• Pooling
• Elasticity
• Automation
• Self-service

Reason for internal IT to not allow public clouds:

• Control
• Security
• Compliance

WMware has created a set of APIs in order to create a hybrid cloud. Ie the possibility ensure things like compliance, control and security but still use a public cloud.

End User computing provides a user centric perspective. Basically pulls applications, data and settings to the (a) cloud. Wmware calls their product Wmware view.

Summary

To summarize the day there has been a lot of discussions and ideas. I hope some of the universities can join forces and test one or more solutions in the future.

The legal, contractual and security aspects are naturally questions  that pop up all the time. So it is good that we have a seminar planned to cover just those issues.