OGF20 May 20071

The 451 GroupGrids: the means to what ends?

Steve Wallage Director of Research William Fellows Principal Analyst

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The 451 Group

• Technology industry analyst company• Agenda: enterprise IT innovation• Analysis that is timely; insight that is

dynamic• Network of 700+ client organizations

globally• Vendors• Investors• Bankers• Early-adopters

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Grid Adoption Research Service (GARS)

• Tracking 250+ enterprise early adopters

• Across a range of sectors:Financial services, telco, pharma, film and gaming, manufacturing, energy, hi-tech, healthcare

• Common business and technology functions:Measuring value, software licensing, data management, utility computing, application development/design, state of market

• Enterprise Computing Strategy industry summits

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EARN-IT: Early Adoption Research Network - IT

• GARS - Grid Adoption Research Service

• CAOS - Commercial Adoption of Open Source

• Security, mobile enterprise…

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Our work with the EC

• FP6 GridEcon project looking at economic and business models for grid usage

• Leading technical working group (TWG7) on business models and SLA for grids

• European Grid Co-ordination Technical Committee

• Member of NESSI• FP7……

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451 view of market - agenda

• Overall state of the market• Drivers• Challenges• Vertical differences

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Levels of deployment

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What to call it?

70% of respondents said there is a better term than ‘grid’ to describe their distributed computing architecture:

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Drivers – GARS users

77%

57%

49%

41%

26%Time to Market

Competition

Do New Things

Save Money

Improved Performance

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Drivers – a broader look

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Drivers – proving the business case

• Tangible vs intangible• Buy-in• Proof of concept• Competitive advantage

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Challenges – GARS interviews

46%

33%

33%

31%

28%

20%

19%

19%

18%

18%

15%

14%

1%Semantic Web

Skills Shortage

App Dev

Lack of Standards

Prove ROI

Grid to Utility

Grid to SOA

Grid Enabling Apps

Security

Data Mgmt

Cultural

Bandwidth

Licensing

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Challenges – a broader look

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Challenges – experiences from a different perspective

• Sensitive data, sensitive apps (medical patient records)• Different organizations get different benefits• Accounting, who pays for what (sharing!)• Security policies: consistent and enforced across the grid• Lack of standards prevent interoperability of components• Current IT culture is not predisposed to sharing resources• Not all applications are grid-ready or grid-enabled• Open source is not equal open source (read the small print)• SLAs based on open source (liability?)• “Static” licensing model don’t embrace grid• Protection of intellectual property • Legal and tax issues (FDA, HIPAA, multi-country grids)

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Cultural challenges

• Ownership and control • CxO buy-in• Importance of stakeholders• Internal SLAs

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Deployment – by vertical

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Vertical market - differences

• Software licensing• Range of applications• Use of desktop scavenging• Use of outsourcing• Use of open source

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Where are we going?

William Fellows

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Levels of deployment

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Next - support broader IT objectives

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What do we know?

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The sweet spots of activity are:

• Enterprise utilities• Platform for shared services

In other words, a technology infrastructure and an application infrastructure.

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The key technology drivers

• Grid technologies• Virtualization• SOA, SOLE, SOIT, SOE….• New approaches to power,

performance, space

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Virtualization• Enterprises are experiencing benefits from

infrastructure virtualization

• Virtualization is being applied at every layer of the IT stack - compute, network, data and apps

• Concerns: sweeping complexity under the carpet, performance overheads, license costs, vendor lock-in, too many moving parts?

• Virtual appliances rival SaaS?

• Do grid and virtualization intersect, converge or collide?

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One approach: a layered view (from EGA reference model)

Business process /

service

Reference Data Risk Management Customer Portal

Virtualized Platform Data Grid Compute Grid Server Farm

Platform Instance Database App Server Web Server

Virtualized Operating

Environment

NFS, CIFS, SMB, NAS

Virtual Machine

Monitors, Solaris Containers, BSD

Jails

Load balancing,

Global IP, Virtual IP

Operating

Environment

File systems

e.g. NTFS, Ext3

Operating Systems

e.g. Linux, Windows

Network protocols

e.g. TCP/IP, UDP

Virtualized Physical LUNs Hypervisors VLANs

Physical Disks, Array

Controller, SAN

switches etc.

Servers,

Blades etc.

Switches,

Routers etc.

Storage Compute Network

Each physical layer provides abstraction to the layer aboveEach virtualized layer provides a flexible mapping/management

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Grid and virtualization: vectors intersect

• Virtualization - a vehicle to realize the dream of  grid computing?

• Mapping virtual workspaces to physical resources - virtual grids

• The end of grid?

• Battle for control - vendors extending into other territories

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Grid and enterprise utility

• Leading adopters implementing ‘grid economy’ across shared resources

• Requires willingness to participate in a shared IT infrastructure

• Self-service is a driver• SaaS and open source are cost-effective

and additive• Next steps - SLA monitoring, policy

management, chargeback across heterogeneous resources

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Grid and public utility computing

• Grid delivers economies of scale for next-generation hosting providers = increased adoption

• Are we ready for utility computing now? (Yes, but don't call it that)

• So what is interesting?

• Issues: multi-tenanted, per-drink pricing, software licenses, SaaS pricing complexity, lack of app services, loss of budget predictability

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Grid and public utility computing

• Users with enterprise utilities are more likely to examine other outsourcing options

• Back in the conversation but won’t be an 'all or nothing' play

• A lot of marketing, but not yet a market • Telcos become IT services providers.

Google, Amazon, eBay take on incumbents (eBay financial markets?)

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IT as a utility

• 80% culture change - 20% technology integration

• Back to the future? • Charge to a business metric not

CPU/hour - at the service delivered to the user not resources used at backend

• Cheaper in-house? Outsourced CPU suppliers need better pricing models

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Rebirth of cool• Enterprise datacenter sales used to be two

dimensional - what is the performance and what is the cost?

• Power consumption, heat dissipation, space and their SLAs are top of procurement conversations

• Blades = less space but more more heat

• Rebirth of mainframe cooling techniques - IBM cool door, HP cool fan, Green Grid..

• Other approaches: pooling/outsourcing for peak loads, multicore, FPGA, cell, GPUs, streaming CPUs

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Rebirth of cool• US EPA Energy Star program: “every dollar spent

on IT equipment, $3 to $4 is spent on operating it over its life”

• Energy costs for UK businesses have increased by 57% during the last 12 months, and now form a significant element of operational expenses, often greater than IT equipment depreciation and sometimes greater than real-estate costs

• How to factor into ROI? Return on Environment - new metric for technology innovation

• 451 Group report: ‘EcoEfficient IT’

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Banks’ verdict: grid is good for…

• Looks capable of driving sustainable, long-term and linear cost savings and performance improvements

• Use of grids to scale across the organization and support additional activities such as exotics

• Can common approaches (above the waterline) drive differentiation and competitive advantage?

• Return to spending on innovation instead of managing complexity

• Utility, flexibility, scale - agility• Scale: “This year's exotic can easily become

next year's flow.”

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Who do we know about?

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Data management

Problem• Interface between compute grid and data grid/cache• File systems are a bottleneck – storage startups solve

it?• Storage not kept up with compute power• Latency is a business issue not a technology issue - for

faster business cycles the time to execute must be less than the time to act

Innovation• Storage/file systems (EMC, NetApp, Ibrix, Nirvana,

Acopia, NeoPath, Isilon) database (Xkoto, Vertica), clustering (PolyServe, Panasas, Isilon, Oracle), caching (Tangosol, GemStone, GigaSpaces, Composite), data integration

• Google BigTable, MapReduce, Sawzall; Microsoft Dryad

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Metering, billing, chargeback

Problem• Measuring virtualized compute, network and

storage resources• Allocation of resources and priority assessment• Rating, mediation• Policy enforcement• Unit of measure

Innovation• Evident Software, LeCayla, Provment, Iontas,

Itheon, IBM CIMS, Digital Fuel

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Managing virtualization. Implementing SLA/policyProblem• Managing VMs• Automation of tasks/run book• Enforcing SLAs/policies• Performance analysis• Semantics

Innovation• VMware, Xen, Scalent, DataSynapse EverGrid,

ToutVirtual, VirtualIron, IBM Meiosys, Platform, UD, Trigence, Dunes

• OpsWare/iConclude, BladeLogic, Cassatt, Egenera, RealOps, Enigmatec, Opalis,Tideway, OpTier

• Dtrace, SystemTap, Sawzall

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Applications

Problem• Run existing applications unchanged, self-service• A platform for new app development or chopping up

older applications? Levels 1 to 5…• New approaches to multi-threading, parallelism• Batch to interactive, real-time: mixed workloads

Innovation• Grid or fabric-aware application servers provide

virtualized containers for apps and app servers• IBM XD, UD/SAP, Oracle, DataSynapse, Platform, BEA,

Scalent, Appistry, Aspeed, 3Tera, Trigence, EverGrid

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Security

Problem• Neglected by many users, believe protected within their

own firewalls• Biggest threat is internal• External challenges - malicious usage, stealing

algorithms, using the grid against its owner, using the grid for unauthorized programs

• Trusting of resource brokers, other internal (can you trust another department ?) and external data sources

• The 451 Group has formed a panel to develop security

recommendations for organizations deploying grids

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Where are we going?

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‘grids’ not ‘The Grid’

• Resurgence of grid• HPC or NGDC? Convergence - datacenter

automation• Could use some some open standards -

but waiting is too risky (getting left behind)• Requires maturity of processes • Some of today’s tools are sufficient - but

we are in the inventory period in terms of usage

• Business and senior management expectations exceed capabilities?

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Beyond using ‘Grid’ to solve HPC

• Define new workloads for grids• Platform to support SoA• Create shared service architecture• Enable collaboration• Standardized semantics• Build composite applications• Create virtual organizations

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grids - through 2010

• Virtualization allows grid to be absorbed into to the enterprise fabric

• Convergence of grids, multicore and virtualization will have a profound effect

• Silos to horizontally integrated resources - enterprise utilities

• Downstream of HPC: mixed workloads, risk management in other verticals, analytics, MDM, ERP

• Batch and real-time/interactive blurring• Mitigate risk through flexibility

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grids - through 2010

• Continued confusion between grid, SOA, virtualization and utility computing

• Vendor execution and partnerships - more important than ‘vision’

• Latency is a business issue not a technology issue - for faster business cycles the time to execute must be less than the time to act

• Users increasingly socialize their IT models • Innovation: companies can’t just cost-cut their

way to prosperity• The end of grid? No. Grid is the means to

many ends

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The 451 GroupGrids: the means to what ends?

Steve Wallage Director of Research William Fellows Principal Analyst

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Thankyou. Questions?