Maricel Cerruti of Teladata

They are pretty funny and I want to introduce them to you.

Number 5:

Number 4:

Number 3:

Number 2:

Number 1:

They are not only funny but accurately describe the current disconnect between IT and facilities departments.

Related posts:

1. IT and Facilities Integration at Data Centers by Future Facilities
2. Japan Data Center Council’s Facilities Standard (required)
3. A Visit with Bruce Myatt, Founder and Chair of Critical Facilities Roundtable

Apple Marketing chief Phil Schiller at a news conference introducing a digital textbook service which will change the way the world works

Apple, with a war chest over $100 billion in cash, has demonstrated that while the past may have found them shying away from taking on the enterprise markets, their plans have developed brand new amazing ecosystems that consumers have adopted and they are piercing the corporate veil from every direction. The idea of forcing those consumers, who also work in the enterprise, to ignore their new playing fields and lose the productivity that comes with Apple’s innovations, strikes this writer as hokum. Productivity rules investment, and, if you think you can rest on your laurels, just ask “Research-In- Motion” how they’re plans are working out.

Steve Jobs evolved from a perfectionist with proprietary propensities, to a “New Economy” entrepreneur and collaborator with a vision for not only the next generation of computing, but with an eye on what the next generation of users will decide to do with his ecosystems. If only Apple would buy out the Department of Education and take charge of educators, we might even compete in global activities in the future.

Yet over at Infoworld they are calling the perceived threats from the piercing of the corporate veil coming out of the IT market “fearmongering” referring to it as “scareware.” Steve Jobs would have gotten a chuckle out of that but the tack at Apple isn’t focused so much on competing, especially, since they prefer to watch the evolution of the user and now understand that the user will decide how information technology evolves, not those holding on for dear life to their past achievements.

Surveys abound saying that fears of security issues caused by mobile devices are unfounded, and that IT concerns are not based on actual issues, but perceived dangers. As phones are being used more and more for identification and password tools, the question remains, will the IT landscape adapt or continue to cringe?

Yet those same surveys claim that “60 percent of companies are now adapting their IT infrastructure to accommodate employees’ personal devices,” “73 percent of C-level executives reported that the growing use of employee-owned technology is a top priority in their organization, and 88 percent said employees are already using personal technology in the business,” and “91 percent of C-level execs and 75 percent of IT leaders said their IT department today has the staff and resources needed to manage the use of consumer technologies.” Most executives, according to these surveys, now say it is simple to integrate consumer devices, and many have actually figured out that instead of punishing employees from interacting with the outside world during business hours, productivity improves from embracing these employee benefits and, if they are really honest, they will admit they have little choice but to hire folks who are savvy about the new relationships they must foster.

Apple continues to open up its ecology and expand its carrying capacity and developers are madly in love with the new approach. The iPad now has released more than 100,000 new apps for the tablet and there doesn’t seem to be any end in sight or anything but an eager audience to be part of the New Economy thinking.

WHAT STEVE JOBS CAN STILL TEACH US
Over at Fast Company, they credit Apple’s success with the fact that Jobs was the “greatest user” of technology who actually got the UX and lived with technology, rather than using it. His enthusiasm for his ecosystems was authentic because he was the number one fan. No one will ever accuse Steve Ballmer or the open source community of embracing the products or applications they produce with that sort of reality.

Attitudes are changing for many reasons but don’t think for a second it isn’t related to a changing of the guard at the helm of many corporations who have grown up in the new world of ecological thinking. While Microsoft seems destined for extinction and Google cringes behind a monoculture that pits itself against allies, are there any other players out there to be taken seriously? By the same token, Apple’s eye is on the future as they are laser-focused on what the kids in grade school are saying and doing and when they officially take over the text book business, look for a sea change in the way the world works.

Related posts:

1. Our iMan 2011!
2. Set-Top Wars, Web 3.0 and Farewell Mr. Jobs
3. What Makes Apple Run And Partly Cloudish

• Tools Needed to Manage Data Centers
• The New Data Center Infrastructure Management Segment
• Chatting with Sherman Ikemoto of Future Facilities

As most people in the data center market know, both facilities and IT folks consider monitoring one of the most important elements in operating data centers. Smaller companies were the first to provide monitoring and reporting functions. Although this is not an exhaustive list, I had a chance to talk to some of these vendors and write about the meetings:

• Visit to OSIsoft
• Visit to Sentilla
• Visit to Modius
• Visit to Arch Rock

I understand their services and their usefulness. Some provide sensor hardware and software, but others provide only software. They all monitor, aggregate, and report several parameters relevant to data center operations, such as temperature, humidity, and power consumption. Some deal only with facilities equipment, and others handle data coming from both facilities and IT equipment. There are no standards by which to measure the data—no standard for frequency of measurement, data formats, or protocols. Each vendor has their set of customers, and they seem to be happy with the solutions they purchased.

Then there are Power Assure, Romonet, and Future Facilities. Power Assure does monitor, but that is not all. It also optimizes the use of power at your data center. Romonet is for capacity planning. Future Facilities provides an electronic version of a data center that you can play with before implementing your design physically. These three cannot be classified as monitoring and reporting vendors. But their functions are important to operating data centers, in addition to monitoring and reporting, so a new term has been introduced to describe a new segment, which is DCIM.

Clearly, DCIM should contain several categories of tools, including those for monitoring and reporting, capacity planning, and simulation. As I said before, this segment is in its infancy; there are no standards or actual-use information. Those who combat day-to-day operation problems would be confused about which tools to select. Do they want to buy one tool at a time or buy a suite of tools? But wait. There is no suite of tools yet, although Future Facilities (for example) has begun to partner with other DCIM vendors to share data.

If we were to develop a suite of tools or a framework or platform for DCIM tools, what would the requirements be? It would help if there were some information from actual use by someone other than the vendors. Because DCIM tools are at a very early stage, there is very little information about them.

To fill that gap, I put together a panel discussion on DCIM at Teladata’s Technology Conversion Conference to be held on February 2 at the Santa Clara Convention Center.The program is here.

Because the needs of operators can be quite different from one data center to another, we will have a good assortment of panelists from different environments:

• Chuck Rego, Chief Architect, High Density Data Centers at Intel Corporation
• Pam Brigham, Director, Global Technology at Equinix
• Phil Reese, Research Computing Strategist at Stanford University

Chuck develops Intel’s DCIM tools for their own and partner use and use commerical ones as well, while Pam at Equinix has homegrown tools. Phil at Stanford is starting to use a commercial tool. I will ask them what problems they perceive as the most important to solve at their data centers and why they chose their solutions, whether their own or commercial tools. Are they quite happy with the tools they are using? If not, what is missing? What additional work is needed to make them work? Conversely, were there any extra benefits they did not expect in applying their DCIM tools?

If you are interested in the answers to these questions, join me and the panelists at the panel and other sessions at the conference.

Related posts:

1. Our Panel’s Conclusion on DCIM Tools
2. What Tools Are Necessary for Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM)?
3. IT and Facilities Integration at Data Centers by Future Facilities

SVLG stands for Silicon Valley Leadership Group, whose vision (from its website) is to:

Ensure the economic health and a high quality of life in Silicon Valley for our entire community by advocating for adequate affordable housing, comprehensive regional transportation, reliable energy, a quality K-12 and higher education system and prepared workforce, a sustainable environment, and business and tax policies that keep California and Silicon Valley competitive.

SVLG has been offering data center energy efficiency (DCEE) conferences for the past three years. It is situated in southern San Jose and surrounded by a large, natural open space.

		Computerized Maintenance Management Solution Buyer’s Guide

Like the previous conferences, this one was sold out, and a lot of people showed up.

Crowds at SVLG DCEE conference. There are more rows behind this.

The agenda for the program was as follows:

I will report on the entire conference, and some sessions in detail, in upcoming blogs.

Carl Guardino, CEO of SVLG, gave the opening remarks. Although he covered a few topics, I only remember one thing (sorry, Carl!!).

Carl Guardino

It is a joint program between SVLG and the City of San Jose to donate your time and money to match 1,000 adult volunteers with 1,000 struggling K–8 public school students to help eliminate the achievement gap in SV.

More can be found here. One type of contribution is to spread the word. So this is a part of my contribution.

Related posts:

1. Data Center Energy Efficiency at Nordic Green II
2. A Summit To Define Better Energy Efficiencies For Data Centers
3. Discussion on Ethernet Energy Efficiency (802.3az) at BroadCom

In my recent visit to Japan, I discovered an interesting application currently under research by NTT DoCoMo, the largest mobile phone network provider in Japan.

It is called mobile spatial statistics, and is described here. In developed countries like the US and Japan, most people carry a cell phone when they go out. To stay operable, each cell phone is tracked by the closest cell tower so that it can remain connected to the wireless mobile network. A mobile phone network provider like NTT DoCoMo can identify each cell phone with its owner’s information, such as name, gender, age, home address, and current location. It is an invasion of privacy if such information is collected and used. However, if we simply detach this information from each individual identity, it is a valuable aid to providing necessary services and data for designing and altering social infrastructures and the distribution of goods.

DoCoMo provides two examples.

The first is that when the population of a city fluctuates, not all parts of the city lose or gain population equally. Currently, the only way to grasp the real movement of the population is to conduct a census. Even then, we can only understand the population spread statically, at people’s homes. In a typical day, people usually leave home in the morning for work or school, take a break for lunch, and go home after work or school. In other words, their movement is dynamic rather than static.

		Power and Cooling for VoIP and IP Telephony Applications

With mobile spatial tracking, we could track the movement of people in a semi-real-time fashion and use that information for city design. If some parts of a city have a denser population at a specific time of the day, we might add special services to alleviate the concentration. For example, if it is too congested at certain bus stops at certain times, we might add more bus services or encourage different commute hours to alleviate the congestion. If a library becomes very crowded at certain hours, we could shift its opening and closing times to solve the congestion. If we can see how people actually move around, we can take the necessary actions to accommodate their movement. This was not possible before mobile spatial statistics (MSS) because we could not obtain such information in semi–real time before. Even the census is taken only every ten years, which makes it useless for MSS.

The second example is to provide appropriate helping hands in the case of disaster. Although Tokyo did not suffer major damage from the March earthquake and its aftershocks in the eastern part of Japan, all its public transportation, including trains, was stopped for an extended period. Because of this, many commuters congregated at and around train stations. As the transportation shutdown continued, food, water, shelter, communications, and other human necessities were running low. In hindsight, appropriate help was not rendered.

Although efforts were made to ease the situation, there was no precise way to tell how many people were at each station, how many of them were elderly, how many might have medical conditions to take care of, and so on. If such information had been available, more appropriate actions could have been taken.

I can think of many more applications. MSS makes needs visible in semi–real time. If we know the details of the needs, we can provide the necessary services and goods to accommodate them. Needs may change with time and location. If we know what they are at a certain location at a certain time, we can send appropriate supplies. Without MSS, we may waste supplies or fail to meet needs. MSS can be thought of as energy efficiency. ICT can be linked to MSS to find an optimal way to provide supplies to satisfy needs.

MSS has a lot of potential and can be applied in any developed country.

Related posts:

1. Review of The Future of Mobile: A Segment Analysis by GigaOM Pro
2. Six Emerging Application Trends in Smart Grid with More ICT
3. A Tour of NTT Facilities in Tokyo

Computing is changing rapidly from fixed location to mobile and from a large form-factor desktop to laptop and handheld devices. GigaOM threw a timely conference to focus on mobile computing. In conjunction with this conference, GigaOM published a report, The Future of Mobile: A Segment Analysis by GigaOM Pro, which comprehensively covers the field of mobile computing, provides some basic information, analyzes each major area and predicts its future, and lists players in each segment. The report is a densely packed 111 pages, but when you finish it, you will have a good picture of the current state of the mobile field. You can get it from here (subscription required).

If I have any complaint with the report, it’s that it did not discuss mobile and energy. Well, maybe that is not a fair accusation because a discussion of mobile computing usually does not include its use for energy management. However, because mobile devices are replacing fixed and semimobile devices for computing, covering mobile and energy might have been a good idea.

The following is my description of the contents of the report. I don’t go into the details, simply because this blog couldn’t cover every subject with equal emphasis. Instead, I will mention some highlights that attracted my attention.

The report contains an introduction and twelve main subjects. I substitute my own headlines for theirs for brevity’s sake. Each section is written by a different author, and some by two authors. If you are overwhelmed by the report’s length, read the first two sections then skip to the areas you’re most interested in.

These are the sections:

1. Introduction
2. Platforms (OS)
3. Tablets
4. Mobile services with cloud
5. Connected devices (Internet of things)
6. Health care
7. Social-location-mobile and e-commerce
8. Mobile search
9. Hyperlocal targeting (digital coupon)
10. Mobile payment
11. Mobile advertising
12. Mobile VoIP and chat
13. Wireless mobile backhaul

1. Introduction: This is a good summary of the report.
2. Platforms: Platforms influence everything, and this section looks at the history of mobile platforms and predicts their future, with some advice from the lessons learned. One such lesson is to avoid channel conflict. As the battle between the iPhone and the Android intensifies, what will Google do to avoid channel conflict? Although other companies like Microsoft are not out of the competition, the two top dogs are the iPhone and the Android. This section is full of good lessons.
3. Tablets: The iPad has a commanding lead at this point, despite other offerings. Apple has set $500 as the price of a standard entry-level model. The price could fall, as more penetration is expected, or rise, with more functionality. The iPad will continue to dominate until 2013 or so, but by 2014 the number of applications available on the Android platform will allow Android-based tablets to overtake it. Amazon’s new version of Kindle may have its place in this segment. Finally, tablets will enter the enterprise market, first in vertical markets like hospitals.
4. Mobile services with cloud: Mobile services are enabled by applications on mobile platforms, derive data in clouds, and convert the data to useful information for consumption. Apple has an early lead in mobile services, but startups and established companies, such as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, cannot be ignored. Apple’s new iCloud this fall is limited to Apple’s platform but may support others. Potential M&As are likely in this space.
5. Connected devices (Internet of things): In 2020, there will be from 50 billion to 1 trillion connected devices, either single- or multipurpose. The latter includes smartphones, which were mentioned several places in the report as key drivers for accelerated mobile market expansion. To collect, process, and turn data into useful information, a set of tools will be required, including hardware, networking, and management platforms that will be hosted in the cloud.
6. Health care: Mobile health care uses wireless devices to manage health conditions, collect health data, monitor vital signs, provide clinical decision support, and access health information. Although now in its infancy, the mobile health market will take off globally, not just in the US, partly because of aging populations in many parts of the world. This space also includes wellness in addition to dealing with the sick, expanding its market applicability. For other drivers, read this section.
7. Social-location-mobile and e-commerce: Location-based services have been mentioned elsewhere, but no significant progress has been made. However, the confluence of social, location, and mobile, or SoLoMo, works well to connect consumers and businesses, providing what consumers want in their current context, including access to social media and their current location. SoLoMo with e-commerce opens up new markets.
8. Mobile search: Google and Microsoft have dominated search, but search in the mobile context is quite different from search on PCs and laptops. People with a mobile device are more location aware and demand more precise information about their current context. A keyword search based on PageRank generates more information than a small display on a mobile device can handle. New entrants are quite possible as the paradigm of search changes in the mobile computing.. One area that stood out and caught my attention is the virtual assistant. As with a human assistant, you do not need to specify the details to get your job done. The virtual assistant executes your job by automatically obtaining the necessary information.
9. Hyperlocal targeting (digital coupon): In short, this is a digital coupon. Consumers are more engaged when they are given coupons (perceived as content) rather than straight marketing messages. People with a mobile device are mobile, and their context, such as a location, changes constantly. Timely coupons and daily deals (with an upfront purchase requirement) will catch their attention.
10. Mobile payment: I was involved with a company that provided security to mobile platforms for mobile payment too early in that market’s maturation process. Now it seems that the market has finally started to move. For mobile payment to work, a good ecosystem needs to be built, including handset OEMs, software vendors, carriers, banks, and credit card companies. Near-field communication (NFC) has emerged as one of a mobile payment solutions and is expected to grow. The total global transaction volume processed through mobile payments will exceed $753.3 billion by 2015, rising from $31.8 billion in 2011. Mobile NFC transactions will be the primary driver of mobile payments through 2015 and will grow from almost $4.3 billion to $595.7 billion in 2015.
11. Mobile advertising: Spending on advertising in the US is $33 billion, but spending in the mobile space will be approximately $4 billion worldwide this year. This space will grow as the population with smartphones grows, because smartphone owners provide a rich target: They browse, search, consume content, and conduct commerce in and through their phones. Advertisers need to be there at those critical moments of purchase decision-making, which now takes place on smartphones—and to a lesser yet still important extent on tablets. Be sure to read about the seven trends in mobile advertising.
12. Mobile VoIP and chat: Juniper Research recently predicted that the total number of mobile VoIP minutes would jump from 15 billion in 2010 to 470.6 billion by 2015, thanks to the proliferation of 3G and 4G networks. The biggest boost will come from the US, which will account for 135 billion mobile VoIP minutes by 2015. It is somewhat difficult to make a precise prediction, because these features eat mobile phone companies’ lunch. One of the drivers is again a smartphone.
13. Wireless mobile backhaul: With the proliferation of smartphones with access to the Internet, the backend requires more bandwidth. Over the next few years, we expect to see increased adoption of wireless backhaul worldwide, with PMP and e-band technologies delivering increasingly attractive and cost-effective solutions for the new LTE networks. The companies to watch in this space are drastically different from the other companies to watch in this report.

The emergence of smartphones like the iPhone that allow access to the Internet and the proliferation of SNS make the mobile space quite different from legacy computing, and even from semimobile laptops. People are more context aware and demand data and information specific to their situation. Also, access to a vast amount of information and data from their SNS enables them to look for specific information. This is a game changer and there is no wonder that both Google and Apple, the two leaders in the smartphone space, show up in each category of companies to watch.

		Comparison Guide: Unified Communications Players

Again, the only complaint I have is the lack of coverage of mobile applications for energy. What was done at a fixed location for energy can now be done with a mobile device. Mobile should open up a new territory to monitor, control, and optimize energy in general. For example, a mobile device can be used to monitor and control energy use at home, for example, by following electricity use and remotely turning equipment on and off. Beyond the home, energy use can be monitored at buildings and factories. With appropriate data, utilities can dispatch repairmen to the exact location of a disturbance in transmission or in a distribution grid. More mobile applications can be developed to optimize the use of energy.

Finally, the report is well written and contains comprehensive information on the status of mobile computing. I highly recommend reading it.

Related posts:

1. Review: Field Guide to the Cloud: Current Trends and Future
2. A Useful Infrastructure Planning Mobile Application by NTT DoCoMo
3. Apple Ecosystems Dictate Future Of The Enterprise

In a recent Critical Facilities Roundtable Technology Group meeting, two speakers from Fujitsu gave interesting talks. The first gave Fujitsu’s take on cloud computing and was presented by Richard McCormack, SVP, Enterprise Systems, Fujitsu America. Most data center meetings are oriented towards facilities people, so a topic like this is rare. Richard was a good presenter and gave a lot of background on the thinking behind Fujitsu’s cloud computing strategies.

Richard McCormack

Before getting into the meat of the presentation, Richard shared some interesting data. An IDC list of the world’s largest IT services companies ranks Fujitsu third, with $24B. First is IBM with $56B, second is HP with $35B, fourth is Accenture with $22B, and fifth is CSC with $16B. Also, on IDC’s list of the world’s largest software companies, Fujitsu is ranked ninth.

Richard’s talk was organized to discuss changes happening in the IT industry, including changes in the business climate. He identified four major points of change and drilled down into each area lightly. The last point of change is the cloud, which was the main topic of the meeting in conjunction with their data centers.

Fujitsu’s understanding of how IT has progressed is as follows. It was first computer-centric (mainframes), then network-centric (distributed computing), and finally human-centric (information is all over the place but can be accessed anywhere). Changing IT are the six Cs:

Six Cs changing IT

Richard also said that the business landscape is changing, and he pointed out three changes: (1) the business border is disappearing, (2) a new generation of people is IT savvy, and (3) the consumer fields lead businesses in technologies.

Fujitsu’s overall vision of IT, consisting of people, information, applications, and the cloud, is illustrated in the following figure.

This view is self-explanatory. The cloud runs applications, which generate and/or collect data and convert it into information. That information is fed to people.

A slide explains each part. As for the people piece:

Again, you may have a slightly different take on this, but you do not disagree with the elements listed here.

As for the information piece:

Again, you probably agree with this description of the information piece. One interesting thing here is that Fujitsu develops and markets many products, including servers, storage, and networking gears. For identity management, Fujitsu has a palm reader that detects a unique vein pattern in your palm. Most palm readers read only the palm perimeter. Thus, if a hand is chopped off, as long as the shape of the palm is intact, you can use the chopped-off hand to gain access. However, vein pattern detection rejects the chopped-off hand. Fujitsu uses this palm reader for their data center access control.

More and more data and information are created from many sources. Fujitsu did a survey to find out how secure people feel about storing their data in the cloud. See here. The regional differences are interesting. People in the US care the most about where their data is, followed by Japan and Europe.

		Virtualization: Optimized Power and Cooling to Maximize Benefits

Fujitsu will publish another report on how much people care about sustainability at data centers from the IT perspective. The report states that interest in conserving energy is falling. The number one reason is that there is no easy and effective way to measure power consumption at data centers. It is a sad reality, but turning it around, if there is an easy but effective way to measure power consumption, people will conserve more.

The applications piece is further explained in the following picture.

Finally, the cloud piece is further described as follows.

Richard did not go into detail on each subject. Although you may arrange these items slightly differently from the way Fujitsu did, they must be relevant to you and your operations. For that reason, it makes sense to present a comprehensive view of the four visions: people, information, applications, and the cloud.

Richard completed the explanation of the “Delivering Change” figure with two slides on delivery of services and new technologies.

The rest of the discussion was about Fujitsu’s data centers. In short, they retrofitted their hosting data centers to:

• expand physical space
• increase power density
• increase high availability
• establish Tier III status

The actual change took place from August 2009 to March 2010. I will report on that in the future, along with their use of fuel cells for power.

This was a good presentation, well prepared and professionally delivered. The only complaint I had was the lack of discussion of Big Data. Fujitsu manufactures almost every kind of device and technology that contributes to the creation of a lot of data, such as mobile devices, Web and Internet devices (including servers and PCs), sensors and RFIDs, and automobile-related technologies and products. Also missing was information about analytics. If we receive a huge amount of data, how would we store and analyze it for our advantage? I would like to hear what Fujitsu has to say about that.

Related posts:

1. Cloud Computing is the Best Thing That Ever Happened to DC Operators #datacenter
2. BigData, Fujitsu’s Way
3. How to Provide Cloud Computing without a Data Center

Allan Leinwand

The number of Zynga’s game users is growing rapidly. The company had its own data center for supporting online games, but their infrastructure could not keep up with the rate of growth (250 million active online users). In 2009, they moved from their own infrastructure to Amazon’s public cloud for scalability and agility with a tool from Rightscale. After a while, they started to develop private cloud because they realized that using public cloud is simply trading capex for opex. Their private cloud, called Zcloud, has some interesting characteristics, such as one virtual machine (VM) for one physical server, rather than multiple VMs sharing the same physical server.

	Virtualization: Optimized Power and Cooling to Maximize Benefits

Today, Zynga implements hybrid cloud by running its private Zcloud and the public AWS cloud together. I do not think they are moving VMs between the two clouds, because there is a limit—60 miles—to how far you can move a VM. Moreover, AWS’s file system is a modified version of the original Xen file system, and Zcloud implements standard Xenserver (according to Allan). VMs on AWS and Zcloud cannot interoperate, even if they solve the distance limitation problem.

Allan also talked about public cloud outages, including for AWS. Any system could fail at one time or another. According to Allan, Zynga designed their applications not to be affected by such failures. The current architecture of Zynga’s system is shown below.

Zynga moved from their own data center to public cloud (AWS) and then created its own private cloud to form hybrid cloud. They must be doing something right to support such rapid growth. I still want to know more about what they actually did, but it was impossible to pick it up in 40 minutes. For example, I want to know how they actually allocate VMs on public cloud and their own Zcloud. Also, what is this orchestration engine in the picture above? I failed to catch Allan after the talk and am dying to know the answers to these questions.

Related posts:

1. Review: Field Guide to the Cloud: Current Trends and Future
2. Oracle after Acquiring Sun
3. Cloud Computing is the Best Thing That Ever Happened to DC Operators #datacenter

The following is a summary and review of the report. To be clear, my comments are in parentheses and start with “ZK.” The report discusses five current trends and makes predictions for 2012. These are the trends:

1. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
2. Platform as a service (PaaS)
3. Software as a service (SaaS)
4. Storage
5. Private/hybrid

IaaS

There are two markets for IaaS: the web and the Internet, and mission critical. The first type is primarily new and smaller companies, including startups. The penetration into this market has been great. The leading vendors include Amazon’s AWS and Rackspace. Derrick calls them IaaS commodity vendors. The revenue information in the commodity IaaS market is not known, because most players are privately held and the financial information is not published. However, the estimated revenues for Amazon AWS and Rackspace are more than $500M and $100M, respectively. The commodity IaaS vendors plan to provide analytics and automation via templates.

		Virtualization: Optimized Power and Cooling to Maximize Benefits

The second market is enterprises that have more stringent requirements before adoption, including security and availability. Derrick’s research (based on the collaborative surveys by GigaOM, The 451 Group and Northbridge Venture Partners) shows security (52%) is more important than availability (30%) among those surveyed. Other requirements include SLAs and prices. The penetration is happening in risk-averse segments but not yet in the mainstream. Another finding is that enterprise customers want VMware solutions in the cloud environment because many of their internal structures are based on VMware solutions. This indicates that enterprises are moving towards the hybrid model. (ZK: This has been discussed in the book Management Strategies for the Cloud Revolution, and companies like Eucalyptus exploit it.) The IaaS vendors will either add more services (such as analytics tools) on top of vanilla IaaS platforms or customize their offerings to vertical markets to attract enterprise customers.

PaaS

(ZK: I had a hard time seeing how PaaS can be used when the vendor lock-in is obvious, but a lot seems to be happening with PaaS. Read on.)

This area is very hot now, as shown by the acquisition of Heroku by Salesforece.com and Makara by Red Hat. PaaS players like DotCloud, PHP Fog, and CloudBees raised millions in venture funding, and Microsoft has the Windows Azure PaaS offering.

Entering this market is relatively easy for web and Internet companies because their security requirements are not as stringent as those of enterprises. Microsoft seems to be doing fine with their PaaS offering, as they acquire large enterprise customers like Toyota, the Associated Press, and Intuit.

Some difficulties with PaaS include support for only one language and limitation to a platform-specific application stack. Other inhibitors include complexity, interoperability, and lock-in. Now vendors are working to support multiple languages and other frameworks.

Prediction: PaaS will take off as a result of big investments by large vendors, advances in control and choice, and more web and mobile applications. New and dynamic applications are relatively lightweight and must be dynamic enough to enable fast bug fixes and updates as well as to respond to sudden spikes in demand. PaaS provides the ideal platform for those applications. According to the survey, PaaS is still a few years away for mainstream IT users, which will adopt them only when the underlying IaaS layer matures. Amazon’s AWS will improve and add its features, including Elastic Beanstalk.

SaaS

(ZK: No need to mention that SaaS started all of these somethings-as-a-service.)

The SaaS market is growing nicely. Gartner estimated its size at $9.2B and $10B in 2010 and 2011, respectively. IDC’s number for the entire cloud market is $72.9B by 2015, with SaaS taking 75% of that pie. Of cloud providers surveyed, 74% offer SaaS and email SaaS (such as Gmail and Hotmail), the biggest chunk in the SaaS offerings.

Prediction: Data integration and services integration will play a big role with SaaS. It will be necessary to integrate data from multiple applications from multiple SaaS. In addition, data virtualization will grow. The emerging company in this field is VirtualWorks.

(ZK: There were no surprises about SaaS’s popularity and progress.)

Cloud Storage

Most cloud storage services are for backup, with the exception of Amazon’s S3 for primary file storage. Cloud storage is as prevalent as SaaS, and 38% of those surveyed use it. Adoption is accelerating. For example, in 2010 S3 had 262B objects, and it will have 700B objects by the end of 2011. Big investments have been made in cloud storage startups. Cloud storage serves both consumers (e.g., DropBox) and enterprises (e.g., Amazon and Rackspace) with different sets of services. One area where cloud storage needs to improve is primary storage. Nasuni is in this segment, providing technologies and services.

Prediction: Cloud storage will shoot next for primary storage for enterprise applications in the cloud. StorSimple is in this segment; it employs technologies similar to those of now-defunct Cirtas. HP and Dell may be in a good position to exploit their storage businesses along with this service. Two areas of interest are network latency, to exchange data in the cloud, and SSD, whose price is going down as more adoptions are expected. Moreover, data privacy will be an issue for cloud storage.

(ZK: I see that smart grid could make good use of cloud storage, as a huge amount of data is constantly created and stored. But I have yet to see any such use.)

Private and Hybrid Cloud

Three relevant trends associated with this subject are penetration of private cloud, PaaS on private cloud, and Openstack.

Private cloud market penetration: Among those surveyed, 63% consider private or hybrid cloud their cloud strategy, and 37% state that they use public cloud only. Eighty percent state that they are moving to either private or hybrid cloud. More companies are moving to adopt private clouds. The top four private cloud startups are Nimbula, Eucalyptus Systems, Cloud.com, and Abiquo, with a total of $73M in venture funding.

PaaS on private cloud: Such PaaS is provided by vendors like CumuLogic, CloudBees, Joyent, and Red Hat. Private IaaS is the base layer.

Openstack: Openstack, as open source, has the potential to make both public and private clouds interoperable and ultimately make hybrid cloud a reality. Influential organizations and companies, including NASA, Rackspace, Cisco, Dell, and Citrix, are becoming involved, along with many smaller companies.

Prediction: Private cloud will be used in conjunction with public cloud to form hybrid cloud, although it is remains to be seen how. Two trends will be advanced hybrid cloud capabilities and a wave of innovation around higher-level features. Some particularly intriguing options for higher-level features would be to integrate Big Data capabilities (e.g., parallel processing with Hadoop), application-level features (e.g., PaaS-like automation or performance monitoring), and support for multiple storage and database options.

Some upcoming technology trends

Two noteworthy trends will be new architectures and best practices (added SLAs and best emerging practices) and network virtualization (networking will be controlled by software rather than networking hardware, attempted by such players as Nicira and Big Switch).

And here are ten more predictions for 2012:

1. Commodity IaaS vendors will push for the enterprise market.
2. Cloud and Big Data will converge further.
3. Solid-state drives will bring whole new applications to both types of IaaS vendors.
4. PaaS acquisitions and launches will heat up.
5. Contraction will occur in the private cloud space.
6. AWS will make an open-source play of some sort.
7. Startups addressing data-center-to-cloud latency will raise big money.
8. Apple’s iCloud and other consumer-focused cloud services will spur PaaS offerings that target mobile developers.
9. Data integration will start giving way to data virtualization.
10. A de-facto or an official cloud security standard will emerge after a serious security breach with IaaS or cloud storage.

I recommend this report. Overall, it is well structured and provides good and precise information on the state of cloud computing and its future.

Related posts:

1. Review of The Future of Mobile: A Segment Analysis by GigaOM Pro
2. An Indispensable Element to Cloud Computing
3. How to Provide Cloud Computing without a Data Center

So it was timely to listen to Brad Williams, Vice President, Utilities Product Strategy, who happened to be a keynote speaker at the recent Networked Grid 2011, to find out what Oracle is up to regarding smart grid.

Brad Williams

He covered quite a number of topics, listed below, but emphasized the importance of information and how to use it for utilities. The following is a summary of his talk.

These were his seven topics:

1. Smart grid investments

2. Consumer transactions

3. Electric vehicles

4. Intermittent renewable and electricity storage

5. Aging assets

6. Smart grid device management

7. Business intelligence and analytics

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Smart grid investments:

• Investments continue but regulators require the added value of smart grid.
• Consumers need to be convinced of smart grid’s value.
• New entrants to the market include Google and Microsoft.
• Some negative media hype exists because of increased power bills.

Brad cited statistics on the growth in the amount of data collected as more smart grid applications are brought in to the utilities to run. The amount of data increases exponentially and may hit more than 800 TB (1 TB is 1,000 times 1 GB). Utilities will face this staggering amount of data and process it to obtain useful information.

Amount of data increases as new applications are added to a Tier-1 utility.

It may be hard to read the picture. These are the labels for the points shown on the graph:

• Advanced Distribution Automation
• Workforce Management Project
• Substation Automation System
• Mobile Data Goes Live
• Remote Terminal Unit (RTU) Upgrade
• GIS System Deployment
• OMS (outage management system) – 200-TB point
• Distribution Management Rollout
• AMI Deployment
• Programmable Communicating Thermostats (PCT) Come On-line – 700-TB point
• New devices in the home enabled by the smart meter – 800-TB point

Consumer transactions:

• Transactions are much more real-time, and IT needs to keep up with them.
• Utilities are educating consumers with key messages like:
  • Rate change and the benefits that come with smart grid
  • More-reliable services
  • Win-win for both utilities and consumers

Oracle’s take is that the discussions with consumers need to expand.

EVs: If managed well, they could be a killer app, but if not, they could disrupt the grid. Seventy-two percent of large utilities are evaluating EV adoption. Oracle thinks smart charging is the area where it can apply its expertise on management information to optimize the charging mechanism.

Intermittent renewable and electricity storage: Oracle is working with its customers to model, monitor, and manage renewable energy sources.

Aging assets: With smart grid, more information is available for devices and components and that will prolong their lives and make it possible to provide timely and proper maintenance.

Smart grid device management: Smart grid brings IT and OT (operations technology) together. An IT company like Oracle could provide services beyond traditional technology fields to the power market.

Business intelligence and analytics: As more data is collected, knowing how to make useful information out of it would give a company a competitive edge.

As you can see, IT companies can make the best of what’s going on in the smart grid market and enter the power utility area with their information technology and data analysis expertise.

Related posts:

1. How Broadband Helps Smart Grid according to FCC
2. What Are Cellular Players Doing for Smart Grid?
3. Six Emerging Application Trends in Smart Grid with More ICT