Economic and Climate Imperatives Combine to Elevate Green IT as Cost-Productive Priority

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on making progress toward Green IT and on what companies can do to improve energy efficiency, reduce carbon footprints and save money.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on Green IT and the many ways to help reduce energy use, stem carbon dioxide creation, and reduce total IT costs -- all at the same time. We're also focusing on how IT can be a benefit to a whole business or corporate-level look at energy use.

We'll look at how current IT planners should view energy concerns, some common approaches to help conserve energy, and at how IT suppliers themselves can make "green" a priority in their new systems and solutions.

[UPDATE: HP named "most green" IT vendor by Newsweek.]

Here to help us better understand the Green IT issues, technologies, and practices impacting today's enterprise IT installations and the larger businesses they support, we're joined by five executives from HP: Christine Reischl, general manager of HP's Industry Standard Servers. Welcome, Christine.

Christine Reischl: Welcome to you.

Gardner: We're also joined by Paul Miller, vice president of Enterprise Servers and Storage Marketing at HP. Hello, Paul.

Paul Miller: Well, thank you.

Gardner: And Michelle Weiss, vice president of marketing for HP's Technology Services. Welcome Michelle.

Michelle Weiss: Hello.

Gardner: Also Jeff Wacker, an EDS Fellow. Welcome, Jeff.

Jeff Wacker: Thank you. Glad to be here.

Gardner: Lastly, Doug Oathout, vice president of Green IT for HP's Enterprise Servers and Storage. Welcome Doug.

Doug Oathout: Good afternoon. Thank you.

Gardner: Doug, let's start with you. Tell us a little bit about what the major concerns are for those who are creating and consuming IT and apparently trying to reduce the amount of energy that they're consuming as well.

Cost of energy

Oathout: The major issue that customers are wrestling with is the current cost of energy. The current cost of energy continues to rise. The amount of energy used by IT is not going down. It continues to rise. So, it's becoming a larger portion of their budget. They're very concerned with managing their expense and, therefore, want to look at energy use and how they can reduce it, not only from a data center perspective, but also from consumption of the monitors, printers, and desktop PCs as well. So, the first major concern is the cost of energy to run IT.

The second one they run into is that they want to extend the life of their data center. They don't want to have to spend $10 million, $50 million, or $100 million to build another data center in this economic environment. They want to extend the life of their data center. So, they want to know anything possible, from best practices to new equipment to new cooling designs, to help them extend the life of the data center.

Lastly, they're concerned with regulations coming in the marketplace. A number of countries already have a demand to reduce power consumption through most of their major companies. We have a European Code of Conduct, that's optional for data centers, and then the U.S. has regulations now in front of Congress to start a cap-and-trade system.

As regulations get passed around the world, clients and customers are going to have to react to them, and they're going to have to know how much energy they're using, as well as their carbon footprint, so they can act upon it to meet the regulatory environment.

Gardner: So, Doug, this is by no means just a "nice to have," this is pretty much a "must-do."

Oathout: This is a must-do. The business environment is saying, "You've got to reduce cost," and then the government is going to come in and say, "You're going to have to reduce your energy." So, this is a must-do.

Gardner: The role of IT is I suppose, fairly prominent, and not just a rounding error.

Oathout: No, it's a big opportunity for the clients, because they can use IT to fix their inefficient processes or to fix how things are running. They can use IT to put intelligence behind some of their processes to reduce the amount of energy and carbon they produce.

Gardner: That means that IT perhaps is more of a solution to the general energy problems than simply the amount of energy that it consumes as a department?

Backbone of digitization

Oathout: It's exactly that. IT can multiply the effects of intelligence being built into the system. IT is the backbone of digitization of information, which allows smart business people to make good, sound decisions.

Gardner: Let's go to Paul Miller now. What are some common issues that you're seeing among the users of your services and solutions at HP? What's the common thought around some of your infrastructure efficiency demands?

Miller: One of the key issues is who owns the problem of energy within the business and within the data center. IT clearly has a role. The CFO has a role. The data center facilities manager has a role. One of the key issues, when we go into a customer, is determining who owns the problem and who owns the decision to change the problem?

The other key element, and we talk about this, is that you can't manage what you can't see. There are very limited tools today to understand where energy is being used, how efficient systems are, and how making changes in your data center can help the end customer.

That's where HP has assembled a set of tools and services that can come in and help customers instrument their data centers. Our expertise in knowing where and how changes to different equipment, different software models, and different service models can drive a significant impact to the amount of energy that customers are using and also help them grow their capacity at the same time.

We recently introduced a product called our Environmental Edge, which instruments an entire data center from those to services to help customers deploy and build brand new data centers.

Technologies like our containers, which we call our Performance-Optimized Data Center (POD), have been designed specifically to enable customers to achieve the highest power utilization and lowest cost for building out a data center. Those are some of the options that we can bring to a customer that has infrastructure energy issues.

Gardner: When we factor in the cost of energy, it seems that the return on investment (ROI) equation moves quite a bit closer to a short-term calculation. Is there some sort of an energy arithmetic that you're seeing among folks, as they examine their spending?

Everyone needs rapid ROI

Miller: In today's economy, everyone needs an ROI that's as quick as possible. It's gone from 12 months down to 6 months. With our new ProLiant G6 servers, the cost and energy savings alone is so significant, when you tie in technologies like virtualization and the power and performance we have, we're seeing up to three months ROI over older servers by companies being able to save on energy plus software costs. It's just not focusing on the energy as energy's sake, but also looking at the efficiencies of the rest of the data center that we take into account.

Gardner: Does the general movement towards conservation across the corporation require a bit of an organizational shift? Do the folks in IT now need to relate to other groups in the organization that they perhaps didn't have to before?

Miller: Absolutely. As I mentioned earlier, typically, the energy costs come at an aggregate level of facilities organizations, and being able to communicate what changes we can make from an IT standpoint into those organizations is critical. It goes all the way up to energy utilization being a corporate issue in helping build the corporate brand by implementing technologies that help a corporation put on a green set of initiatives and help build the entire brand for the company.

Gardner: Let's go next to Christine Reischl. Christine, with millions literally of servers pouring off of assembly lines, what do you do in terms of bringing energy efficiency into the design? Is there a great deal being done across the life cycle of the products themselves?

Reischl: Yes. Energy efficiency is one of our critical design objectives for our product, and we have been innovating in power cooling and software for years now. We have quite a significant amount of HP Labs activity going on with process applications, and so forth. Our customers are benefiting from that hardware right now.

As an example, the G6 servers, the new generation of our x86 servers, which use 50 percent less power, are 50 percent more energy efficient and have 50 percent less power utilization than servers sold several years ago. In addition to that, there is a claiming capacity possibility, as well as extending the life of the data center.

How did we do that for our G6 servers? It was really coming with innovation. The first one, as an example, involves the Sea of Sensors, which are 32 smart thermal sensors across our servers that constantly optimize the energy use, the fan speed, and the acoustics.

Another example is the Dynamic Power Capping, where we have a safe way of limiting the power

Energy efficiency is one of our critical design objectives for our product, and we have been innovating in power cooling and software for years now

draw or power consumption without impacting performance, so that customers can really fill up their racks and up to triple their service in the data center.

Another example is the common power supply, which allows the power supply to run at efficiency levels of 92 percent and above, which again helps with the power consumption tremendously. Those are the examples of our G6, a broad new generation of x86 servers which came out end of March and is here, filling out the portfolio.

At the same time, we also have announced just recently a new product family, the SL product family, which allows for specific energy savings of 30 percent for a current generation of products. This is specifically, from a design objective, targeting a low-Watt environment per server.

Gardner: As we pointed out earlier, this whole ROI equation is so important, assuming that we're only getting a certain distance into what's potentially possible at energy savings. How far into this potential efficiency drive do you think we are?

Continuous innovation

Reischl: Well, we have been investing in that area for several years now. We will have an energy power cooling roadmap and we will continuously launch innovation as we go along. We also have an overall environment around power and cooling, which we call the Thermal Logic environment. Under this umbrella, we are not only innovating on the hardware side, but on the software side as well, to ensure that we can benefit on both sides for our customers.

In addition to that, HP ProCurve, for example, has switches that now use 40 percent less energy than industry average network switches. We also have our StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array, which reduces the cost of power and cooling by 50 percent using thin provisioning and larger capacity disks.

So, not only are we talking about servers, but we are also talking about storage and ProCurve

That is clearly a big benefit for winning deals and helping our customer to operate efficiency.

switches in this context. The greater HP environment around innovation is on those greater types of divisions and engagements.

Gardner: I've received questions about Energy Star ratings and what that means. Are there certain incentives in terms of whether you adopt an Energy Star-rated device or not, how does that work?

Reischl: The high-volume products or our G6 servers have the Energy Star rating. Clearly, what it documents and demonstrates is that we are the only ones in the industry who are able to certify for Energy Star, which again speaks to the fact of how power- and cooling-efficient our servers are. That is clearly a big benefit for winning deals and helping our customer to operate efficiency.

Gardner: Thank you so much. Michelle Weiss, when it comes to people and process, when we look at solutions level approaches to IT and overall energy conservation, what is HP doing? What are some of the general solution approaches to helping your customers get greener?

Weiss: Well, Dana, for us it's pretty simple, because it's really all about helping clients use their resources -- using what you've got more efficiently and effectively.

You can start with those infrastructure resources. We just heard Christine speak to those and Paul as well. We can help clients with things like consolidation, whether simple consolidation or all the way up to a big data-center consolidation, like HP did, going from 85 data centers down to 6 locations.

We could help with virtualization. We could also help with networking, a more efficient network design, or more efficient installation. Christine spoke about storage. We could certainly go to and help people profile their data to see if there is wasted space or if the data needs to be tiered or consolidated.

Obviously, we're talking about energy and energy-efficiency analysis. Paul was talking about the facilities and the IT person coming together and having a discussion.

Hands-on assessment

We can go in and do a hands-on assessment of the actual power use in the data center and provide people with a report that says, "Here's what you're using and here's our recommendation." We can go from a very low cost recommendation, like, "You should shut down an air conditioner," all the way up to a very extensive recommendation.

Let me talk for just a second about the human resources, because you spoke about that, and I think it's an often-overlooked area about getting more efficiency out of our human resources.

We have a lot of HP education, very much geared for IT personnel around getting them more capable and effective around technology areas like virtualization. But, we also have a lot of capability to help people with training in the use of things like videoconferencing with Halo technology, etc. So, it's all of those things together, using those resources more efficiently.

Gardner: Now, there is more than energy when it comes to being green. There is reducing

. . . by 2010, HP will have recycled over two billion pounds of product.

waste, recycling, and examining the lifecycle of a device from cradle to grave, and then also being mindful of how to properly dispose of those parts that can't be recycled. Tell us about the solutions are for how equipment gets sunset.

Weiss: This is a really interesting area. I don't know if you know this, Dana, but by 2010, HP will have recycled over two billion pounds of product. For someone that's always trying to lose weight, I think about that -- my God, that's a lot of product.

We've won a lot of recycling awards throughout the U.S. and abroad. We we’re the first computer company to actually have a recycling plant -- it's actually located near to me -- which we opened about a dozen years ago. So, we do a lot of that.

We also provide other options for disposal, other options to purchase recycled or refurbished products for our customers, and we also have HP Financial Services that come in and ensure that IT equipment that has passed its prime can actually be disposed of in a way that will help meet local environmental laws. We have a lot of work on asset recovery and a lot of work on that end stage of the lifecycle.

Gardner: Is there a great deal of education that needs to take place with IT? Are IT folks generally already thinking about life cycle and recycling, or is this an educational issue as well?

Thinking of a lifecycle

Weiss: It's both. IT tends to think in terms of a lifecycle. If you think about ITIL and all of the processes and procedures most IT people follow, they tend to be more process oriented than most groups. But, there is even more understanding now about that latter stage of the lifecycle and not just in terms of disposing of equipment.

The other area that people are really thinking about now is data -- what do you do at the end of the lifecycle of data? How do you keep the data around that you need to, and what do you do about data that you need to archive and maybe put on less energy-consuming devices? That's a very big area.

Gardner: Having high redundancy of data, of course, is basically wasted cycles, wasted electrons, and wasted money.

Weiss: Exactly. That footprint is very large when you really think about that entire supply chain of energy.

Gardner: Thanks so much. Let's go over to Jeff Wacker at EDS, an HP company. As a fellow there at EDS, Jeff, tell us a bit about what EDS, as a very large global hosting organization, is doing in regard to going green.

Wacker: We're a services play. We look for total solutions, as opposed to spot solutions, as we approach the entire ecology, energy, and efficiency triumvirate. It's all three of those things in one. It's not just energy. It's all three.

My colleagues have talked very eloquently about data centers and hardware. I'll mention a little more on data centers. One of the things I wanted to bring up was that we look from the origination all the way through the delivery of the data in a business process. Not only do we do the data centers, and run servers, storage, and communications, but we also run applications.

You may not have heard of green applications, but, indeed, applications are also high on the order of whether they are green or not. First of all, it means reconciling an application's portfolio, so that you're not running three applications in three different places. That will run three different server platforms and therefore will require more energy.

It's being able to understand the inefficiencies with which we've coded much of our application services in the past, and understanding that there are much more efficient ways to use the emerging technologies and the emerging servers than we've ever used before. So, we have a very high focus on building green applications and reconciling existing portfolios of applications into green portfolios.

How you use IT

Moving onto the business processes, the best data delivered into the worst process will not improve that process at all. It will just have extended it. Business process outsourcing, business process consulting, and understanding how you use IT in the business is continuing to have a very large impact on environmental and green.

Gardner: Now, given that you have high stakes in cutting your cost and reducing redundancy and waste, I'd think this goes right to your bottom line as an outsourcer. What metrics of success do you use, how do you measure, and how do you know when you're doing the right things?

Wacker: It's a good question. There are a lot of metrics out there, and a lot of them were built with the efficiency of buildings in mind, and some, directly with data centers in mind. The defense council on integration and efficiency has created a data-center infrastructure efficiency (DCIE). There is a power-usage effectiveness (PUE), or essentially an inverse of one over the other. What they do is ask, "How many Watts does it take for you to run the infrastructure of the data center in order to drive a watt of power at a server?"

These are traditional metrics. Quite frankly, right now we, as well as others in the industry, are looking at new metrics, because it's both sides of the equation. You want an efficient data center. You want efficient use of the watts that are going into the servers. So, you now have to consider how many partitions am I running, how smart are the power supplies and the fans on these servers, everything that's been talked about before.

Moving into the data center, we're looking at capabilities that are using, for example, air

. . . if you know where you're getting your IT from, you can ask that supplier how green is your IT, and hold that supplier to a high standard of green IT.

handling in the proper locations that allow you not to use compression. Anybody who runs their air conditioner during the summer knows that a lot of their electricity charges are running that compressor, which is actually creating the cooling capability for their house.

If we are locating some of our data centers in locations where the air is of a certain temperature that allows us to run data centers without compression 97 or 98 percent of the year, you can imagine that we have created quite a bit of savings for us.

Gardner: That's true, of course, for your data centers. Other organizations that are looking at how to place their data centers, I suppose, have more sourcing options. We've heard a lot about cloud computing recently. How impactful is this long-term decision about how many data centers? I suppose also at the architectural level of what sort of applications and architectures you want to support, is this top of mind for all the folks you're dealing with?

Wacker: Well, it is becoming top of mind, and you've already identified the major culprit in this. That is that the cost of energy is going to continue to accelerate, and to be higher and higher, and therefore a major component of your cost structure in running IT. So yes, everybody is looking at that.

One of the things about what has been called cloud or Adaptive Infrastructure is that you've got to look at it from two sides. One, if you know where you're getting your IT from, you can ask that supplier how green is your IT, and hold that supplier to a high standard of green IT. That's the type of a standard that HP seeks to meet at all times.

But, not everybody who is going to be running computing infrastructure within the cloud is going to meet that. So, one of the big challenges of cloud computing is how green are they. You, as a corporation, have to identify all of your green for cap-and-trade or for the regulations. You're going to have to know that. So there are going to be some interesting disclosures that will be coming up as we move down the road.

A two-sided sword

On the other hand, cloud is, by its definition, moving a lot of processes into a very few number of boxes -- ultra virtualization, ultra flexibility. So it's a two-sided sword and both sides have to be looked at. One, is for you to be able to get the benefits of the cloud, but the other one is to make sure that the cost of the cloud, both in terms of capabilities as well as the environment, are in your mindset as you contract.

Gardner: Unfortunately, we're asking even more of our beleaguered IT executives and strategists. They're being asked to do more for less now in terms of productivity, but we're going to be asking them to do less in terms of their energy use, and then thinking outside the box when it comes to the sourcing options and how to factor the green across an ecology of providers.

I'd like to take the question to both Paul and Michelle. How do these IT strategists get a handle on this? What are some first steps for them?

Weiss: Let me start and then I can turn it over to Paul. One of the really clear things we have seen in our experience is that taking a set of uncoordinated approaches to this whole area just doesn't work. You really are better off if you have a top-down view of what you're trying to do. So, always understand your strategy and build the plan around that.

Certainly, we've got services both from our Technology Services organization and from Jeff in

We can help make that case in business language, because this is all about business technology.

EDS about helping people make the case. As Paul was talking earlier today, many people are actually making the case to their CFO. It's no longer always a CIO concern.

We can help make that case in business language, because this is all about business technology. It's all about driving business outcomes. We can help make that case in plain business terms, either around energy efficiency that you can do, around adopting, for example, the G6 servers, or around a virtualization project. We can do that in business language.

Gardner: Paul, what sort of approaches won't work? The first thing that comes to my mind is doing nothing. It sounds like proactive is the message of the day.

Miller: Yeah, two things ... One is doing nothing. The other is jumping at a lot of claims out there. There are multiple claims out there. Every time I see a press release or I see an advertisement, it has a claim on energy efficiency. As Jeff pointed out, you need to have an approach on this that looks at it from a data center, from a PUE, standpoint, and just not jump on the claim of the day.

The other element is that the claim of the day is done a lot around a specific application or a specific setup that may not be appropriate for your business. So, take time to research. Look for companies like HP that have power calculators that you can plug your own unique configurations into, but then go beyond that.

Coordinated approach

One of the other things, and this goes to what Michelle was talking about, is a coordinated approach. A coordinated approach is not just about buying energy efficient equipment. It's about managing them very effectively.

We have our power capping tool, which enables you to set specific power limits within the data center, so that you can guarantee an outcome for your energy, an outcome for your power, an outcome for your performance that you're going to have from a service-level agreement (SLA). Building intelligence into them is critical for the long-term success and long-term savings of power for your environment.

Gardner: A last set of questions. Doug, at this point, what should we expect in the future? Are we undertaking a journey and we're only in the very first steps, now that energy and the environment have become so prominent?

Oathout: Dana, this is an ongoing process. This process of energy efficiency never ends. As Michelle and Paul pointed out, once you undertake a simple assessment of figuring out how much energy you're consuming, where it’s being consumed, then you develop a roadmap for virtualization, you develop a roadmap for consolidation, you develop a roadmap for application efficiency, then you start all over again.

It's an ongoing, continuous process improvement that you do every day, every week, every month. It's a journey that bears fruit. It can be a small project or it can be a large project, but the key is to have a snapshot of where you are today and then measure yourself on an ongoing basis on your progression.

The servers are more efficient than they were three years ago. Our storage is more efficient than

It's an ongoing, continuous process improvement that you do every day, every week, every month. It's a journey that bears fruit.

it was three years ago. Our networking is more efficient. There are all different kinds of projects based on technology, but there is also technology in software and services that can help you gain even more efficiencies. This is the beginning of a never-ending process, but it does bear fruit on an ongoing basis.

Gardner: I have to imagine that a lot of people feel pretty strongly about this, and the community approach could be quite powerful. Do we have avenues for how folks in the field who might have some ideas themselves about process, technology, and perhaps even other aspects of this equation can contribute?

Oathout: We have both an internal and an external green website that is continually taking questions and being monitored for ideas. Our internal sales team can go through our green website, and our external clients and consultants can take advantage of HP's knowledge, as well, through our external green website.

Gardner: Well, I'm afraid we're about out of time. We've been discussing green IT and the many ways that IT can help reduce energy and play a larger role in the "greenification" of enterprises at large.

We've been joined by a panel of five executives from HP. We've been joined by Christine Reischl, general manager of HP's Industry Standard Servers. Thank you, Christine.

Reischl: Thank you.

Gardner: Paul Miller, vice president of Enterprise Servers and Storage Marketing at HP. Thank you, Paul.

Miller: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: Michelle Weiss, vice president of marketing for HP's Technology Services.

Weiss: It's been a pleasure.

Gardner: Jeff Wacker, an EDS Fellow. Thank you, Jeff.

Wacker: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And Doug Oathout, vice president of Green IT for HP's Enterprise Servers and Storage.

Oathout: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner. You have been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. Thanks for joining and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on making progress toward Green IT and on what companies can do to improve energy efficiency, reduce carbon footprints and save money. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2009. All rights reserved.

Cloud and Security Join Boundaryless Information as Top-of-Mind Issues for The Open Group

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast with Allen Brown, president and CEO of The Open Group, on the state of the organization. Recorded live at The Open Group's 23rd Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in Toronto.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.

Today, we welcome our listeners to a sponsored podcast discussion coming to you from The Open Group’s 23rd Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in Toronto.

Our topic for this podcast, part of a series from the conference, centers on The Open Group itself. We're going to be talking with Allen Brown, president and CEO of The Open Group, about the organization and its recent fast growth. Welcome back to the show, Allen.

Allen Brown: Hi, Dana. It’s good to be talking to you again.

Gardner: Well, the last time you and I spoke, you were just unveiling the TOGAF 9 Framework, and from all indications, this has really become quite popular.

Brown: There have been more than 30,000 downloads of TOGAF 9, since we launched it, bringing us to about 125,000 TOGAF downloads in total. We've sold more than 21,000 hard copies of the TOGAF book, and certification is continuing to grow. We've passed the 10,000 number milestone for TOGAF certified practitioners. It has just been growing and taking off. It's fantastic.

Gardner: Of course, this has been happening during a difficult economic environment. Do we have some larger takeaways about enterprise architecture (EA) in general from these results?

Brown: I sometimes just think that we're very fortunate to be where we are, but there must be something more than that, I guess. We've been working on TOGAF for many, many years.

We started off in a situation where organizations recognized that they needed to break down the boundaries between their organizations. They're now finding that they need to continue that, and that investing in EA is a solid investment developing for the future. You're not going to stop that just because there is a downturn.

In fact, some of our members who I've been speaking to see EA as critical to ready their organization for coming out of this economic downturn.

Gardner: We've also seen a great deal of interest in security issues. I noticed at the previous conference, as well as this one, a significant devotion to security issues. How important are enterprise architects to the general health of an organization when it comes to security?

Brown: We're seeing more and more of that come along. We're seeing the merger of the need for EA with security. We've got a number of security initiatives in areas of architecture, compliance, audit, risk management, trust, and so on. But the key is bringing those two things together, because we're seeing a lot of evidence that there are more concerns about security.

As one CIO of a major organization in the U.S. explained to me, "We're using EA. We're using TOGAF. We've modified it. We've pretty much got the integration stuff down, but the biggest concern that I have is security."

Gardner: I've noticed also from some of the presentations here at the conference a rather dramatic increase in the global uptake in EA, and TOGAF is an indication of that. Perhaps you could give us a sense of where this is welling up in terms of growth around the world.

International growth

Brown: Well, it’s been quite dramatic. We've entered into agreements with organizations to represent us, in a franchise kind of way, in different countries. We've had an agreement with Japan for many years. We then went into South Africa. But, in this last quarter, we launched The Open Group China. We had a fantastic launch event in Beijing in May.

We had the first conference of The Open Group France in this quarter, with some brilliant presentations by people like Air France, KLM, showing how EA is used to benefit their merger. We've also entered into an agreement with an organization that is going to represent us in the Arabic speaking countries, as well.

Gardner: One of the things that’s impressed me in tracking TOGAF and The Open Group for the past several years is the emphasis you’ve put on Boundaryless Information Flow. A few years ago, that played a great role in services orientation and the movements around that, but now its also playing quite a role in what’s being referred to in many cores as cloud computing.

In cloud, there are various sourcing options, different approaches to the economics that support IT, but in doing so perhaps are even making IT and business processes more agile. How do you see this vision that The Open Group has had around "boundarylessness" relate to cloud computing.

Brown: We looked again at boundaries, because each year we review our strategy, and we were

You’ve got to be able to deliver it not as data, but as information to those cross-functional groups -- those groups within your organization that may be partnering with their business partners.

wondering about whether the vision was still sustainable. Obviously it came from our Customer Council, our end-user organization members in the first place, and driven again by that need for information to be integrated, aggregated, and delivered to those that were entitled to it whenever they needed it.

You've got situations now where information can flow within organizations and it can flow between organization, and we're breaking down the silos within departments in organizations. We've always had this challenge of how do we breakdown the silos in the IT function. As we're moving towards areas like cloud, we're starting to see some federation of the way in which the IT infrastructure is assembled.

As far as the information, wherever it is, and what parts of it are as a service, you've still got to be able to integrate it, pull it together, and have it in a coherent manner. You’ve got to be able to deliver it not as data, but as information to those cross-functional groups -- those groups within your organization that may be partnering with their business partners. You've got to deliver that as information.

The whole concept of Boundaryless Information Flow, we found, was even more relevant in the world of cloud computing. I believe that cloud is part of an extension of the way that we're going to break down these stovepipes and silos in the IT infrastructure and enable Boundaryless Information Flow to extend.

Gardner: The role of the enterprise architect seems also be benefiting from this abstraction to a variety of sourcing options. To just focus on the solution architecture, a technological or platform architectural approach, or technology set doesn’t get to that higher value of the top-down look, and bringing what could be a series of services in a process to the betterment of the business itself, the outcomes that the business is seeking.

Do you think that there is also some relationship? Now that we have more sources of compute applications data and infrastructure, we expect more. There's a relationship between the uptake in your framework and the architectural view and this added layer of complexity?

Raising competence

Brown: Absolutely. As the layer of complexity increases, we need more capability from enterprise architects. That’s why we're concerned, and our members are concerned, about raising the level of professional competence amongst enterprise architects, because they actually have to have the skills, not only technical, but also the people skills, the softer skills, to be able to bring this together.

One of the things that we found internally in moving from the business side of what our architecture is that the stakeholders understand to where the developers can understand, is that you absolutely need that skill in being able to be the person that does the translation. You can deliver to the business guys what it is you're doing in ways that they understand, but you can also interpret it for the technical guys in ways that they can understand.

As this gets more complex, we've got to have the equivalent of city-plan type architects, we've got to have building regulation type architects, and we've got to have the actual solution architect.

Many of us are responding to business demands for where architecture needs to go. So, it’s not architecture for architecture's sake. We're not doing EA because it sounds cool. We're doing it because we have real business concerns. Some of them are developing new product, but a lot of them are reducing risk -- operational risk and security risk.

So, as the organization does this, we've got to ensure that we find ways of bringing it back together into some sort of coherent whole. The real skill of the architect is to bring that all together.

Gardner: I've also noticed, sticking with the cloud topic a bit, that small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have been very interested in cloud. Perhaps they're early adopters even more so than large enterprises, and perhaps they've been getting used to cloud vis-à-vis their use of software-as-a-service (SaaS), certain applications coming across the Web. Is there a role for EA in these SMBs as well?

Brown: There absolutely is, because SMBs are becoming more complex themselves. They are

One of the reasons that SMBs go to the cloud is because it's more secure than they can do themselves.

looking at integrated applications and integrated solutions. So it is much more complex in a small organization than it used to be.

But, at the same time, you don't have the availability of the skills, and so one of the big challenges we have in serving SMBs effectively with EA is to provide ways of enabling them to get access to those skills.

Our members did a survey of Open Group Architecture Forum members, and one of the things that came out of that survey was that the average number of enterprise architects in an organization is between two and four percent of the IT organization. For small business, that's maybe two hours a week. Any more than that is not affordable, and it's out of scale with the large organizations. So we've got that challenge.

The other part is about outsourcing and using cloud effectively by small organization. I know that we've heard a lot about one of the issues with cloud being security. One of the reasons that SMBs go to the cloud is because it's more secure than they can do themselves. So, there is always that tradeoff.

But, we do need to provide ways in which they can have more available expertise on hand to help them with EA.

Sourcing issues

Gardner: For these SMBs and enterprises that are looking to the cloud to improve their productivity in general, perhaps by reducing costs and offloading some capital expenditures, that security issue seems to be coming up all the more often, as they really pursue these issues around sourcing and cloud.

What do you have in store for security? I know there are several activities out there. There is Jericho and the Cloud Alliance. I'm wondering what the next shoe to fall might be in terms of The Open Group and cloud security.

Brown: IT security continues to be a problem area for enterprise IT organizations. It's an area where our members have asked us to focus more. Besides the obvious issues, the move to cloud does introduce some more security concerns, especially for the large organizations, and it continues to be seen as an obstacle.

On the vendor side, the cloud community recognizes they've got to get security, compliance, risk, and audit sorted out. That's the sort of thing our Security Forum will be working on. That provides more opportunity on the vendor side for cloud services.

On the customer side, there is widespread recognition that getting security requirements expressed now is critical, so that the cloud-service vendors develop the right controls and processes to meet enterprise security requirements.

Gardner: Are there any working groups or activities that you're devoting specifically to cloud to ameliorate some of these security concerns, so that we get the best of both worlds?

Brown: We're working on a number of areas. One of the things that we've always done in The Open Group is to look to our customer members, the end user organizations that are our

On the customer side, there is widespread recognition that getting security requirements expressed now is critical, so that the cloud-service vendors develop the right controls and processes to meet enterprise security requirements.

members. We always look to them first. They were the people who came along 15 or 16 years ago and said, "We have to have standards for how to do EA." These are the people who came along and said, "We need access to integrated information and we need a Boundaryless Information Flow."

Right now, we're looking to them. On Wednesday morning, here in Toronto, we will be conducting what we call a "business scenario." Business scenarios are a method within TOGAF, which is itself a method.

We'll be conducting a business scenario to look at the customer requirements, pain points, challenges, and concerns with cloud computing. That's really an absolute catalyst for us, looking at what the customers actually want, because that drives the market.

We've also got activity within the Security Forum itself. They're focused on that security in Jericho. They're both focused on cloud activities. We're looking to announce -- tomorrow, I believe -- a cloud work group within The Open Group.

Working collaboratively

As with everything, The Open Group never believes that we have all of the answers or that we're going to solve everything. We have to work collaboratively with other standards organizations, other consortia, with the vendors and the customers, and we will define what we believe our role is to be. It's never the center of the universe. It's always a contributor to these part, and that's what we're going to be talking about on Tuesday.

On Wednesday evening, we're hosting a cloud camp, just trying to support that area of activity. Since we're in Toronto, we thought that was a good idea.

Gardner: As we work through the evolution of security for cloud activities and a comfort level develops around that, I think the next part of the discussion will be around neutrality or portability for data applications, run time environments, just general intellectual property. I know it's a bit early in the evolution of this, but is there any sense of what role The Open Group might play in terms of this portability and neutrality issue?

Brown: That takes me back a while. When I first joined The Open Group, too many years ago to remember, portability was what we were doing. We did the X/Open Portability Guide -- XPG4 was the one that really took off -- unifying the Unix operating platform.

We can see that there are concerns. We've come full circle. Now there are concerns about portability around the cloud platform opportunities. It's too early to know how deep the concern is and what the challenges are, but obviously it's something that we're well used to -- looking at how we adopt, adapt, and integrate standards in that area, and how we would look for establishing the best practices.

Gardner: We've been discussing the role of The Open Group since the beginning of the year. They had a very big roll out with TOGAF 9, and there are several prominent issues -- security and xloud not the least among them -- that are top of mind for architects moving forward. I want to thank our guest Allen Brown, president and CEO of The Open Group.

Brown: Well, thanks for talking to us, Dana.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You've been listening to a special BriefingsDirect podcast coming from The Open Group's 23rd Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in Toronto. We're here the week of July 20, 2009. Thanks for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast with Allen Brown, president and CEO of The Open Group, on the state of the organization. Recorded live at The Open Group's 23rd Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in Toronto. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2009. All rights reserved.

Harnessing Enterprise Clouds: Many Technical Underpinnings Already in Today's Data Centers

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast that examines how enterprises are increasingly focused and ready for delivery and consumption of cloud-based infrastructure and other services.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard.

Free Offer: Get a complimentary copy of the new book Cloud Computing For Dummies courtesy of Hewlett-Packard at www.hp.com/go/cloudpodcastoffer.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on quickly harnessing the technical benefits of cloud computing approaches. We will examine how enterprises are increasingly focused on delivery and consumption of cloud-based infrastructure and services.

But, we'll look at how many of the technical underpinnings of cloud are available now for organizations to leverage in their in-house data centers, whether it’s moving to highly scalable servers and storage, deeper use of virtualization technologies, improved management and automation for elastic compute provisioning, or service management and governance expertise. Much of what makes the cloud tick is already being used inside of many data centers today.

We expect that the way the clouds are built will be refined for more and more enterprises over time. The early goal is gaining the efficiency, control and business benefits of an everything-as-a-service approach, without the downside and risks.

The interest in cloud adoption is being fueled by economics, energy concerns, skills shortages, and complexity. Getting the best paybacks from cloud efforts early and often and by bringing them on-premises, can help prevent missing the rewards of cloud models later by being unprepared or inexperienced now.

Here to help us better understand how to make the most of cloud technologies are four experts from Hewlett-Packard (HP). Please join me in welcoming Pete Brey, worldwide marketing manager for HP StorageWorks group. Welcome to the show, Pete.

Pete Brey: Thank you.

Gardner: We're also joined by Ed Turkel, manager of business development for HP Scalable Computing and Infrastructure. Welcome, Ed.

Ed Turkel: Thank you.

Gardner: We are also joined by Tim Van Ash, director of software as a service (SaaS) products in the HP Software and Solutions group. Welcome, Tim.

Tim Van Ash: Hi, Dana.

Gardner: And also Gary Thome, chief strategist for infrastructure software and blades at HP. Welcome to the show, Gary.

Gary Thome: Thank you, very much.

Gardner: Ed, let me take the first question to you. HP has been a supplier of the picks and shovels, if you will, to cloud service providers for many years. As we're starting to take these technologies to the enterprise for their requirements around scale, lower cost, flexibility and efficiency, what are we talking about when we discuss cloud? What comprises cloud for these enterprises and how they are adapting to it?

What do we mean by cloud?

Turkel: The first thing is when we talk about cloud, what do we mean? What is our definition of cloud? We like to talk about the cloud as a means by which global-class, highly scalable, and flexible services can be delivered and consumed over the Internet on an as needed and pay-per-use business model. This enables new access, new capabilities, and new connections.

As a scalable computing and infrastructure organization, we have been selling to the major cloud providers for the last few years, we have been seeing this major trend toward a style of scale-out computing that they are then delivering as a service to their customers.

This is causing some significant trends simply in the way that they internally themselves deploy IT. First of all, they are building very large environments. So, when we talk about scale-out, we're talking about extreme scale-out. We are talking about numbers of servers, not in the tens or hundreds, but in the thousands, and often tens of thousands, within a single computing environment. We are talking about volumes of storage that go well beyond petabytes of storage, again in a single environment.

That creates challenges in the data centers in which they are deploying in terms of an almost pathological focus on power and cooling, because if you're putting together an environment that large, every penny-per-kilowatt has a huge impact on the return on investment (ROI) for those environments.

What we've seen happen over the years, as the cloud providers themselves have been building

. . . we're starting to see enterprise customers who are looking at the cloud providers themselves as sort of a best of breed kind of IT environment . . .

out their environments, is that their customers are looking at the cloud providers and thinking to themselves, "If these guys can do it, if these guys can get some great benefits on reduced costs, on improved power efficiency, on increased agility, through their computing environments, why can’t I?"

So, we're starting to see enterprise customers who are looking at the cloud providers themselves as sort of a best of breed kind of IT environment and they're starting to look at how can they emulate this within their own environments. Thus they are saying, "Why can’t we do that? How can we buy the same environments? What else should we build out to be able to get those kinds of advantages?"

Gardner: Now, we talked about some of the economic impetus around this. Tim Van Ash, there is also, of course, the simultaneous trend in the business around converting IT to an IT service or a managed service organization. As someone who has been dealing with SaaS for sometime, does moving a cloud technology to the enterprise, dovetail well with this whole notion of a service provider role for IT?

Van Ash: When you look at becoming a service provider, technology is a key part of it, architecting yourself to be able to support the service levels around delivering a service, as opposed to some of the more traditional ways that we saw IT evolve. Then, applications were added to the environment, and the environment was expanded, but it wasn’t necessarily architected around the application in all cases.

Another thing is that, when they move to a service provider role, it's as much about how they structure their organization to be able to deliver those services. That means being able to not only have the sort of operational teams that are running and supporting the application, but also have the customer-facing sides, who are managing the business relationships, whether they would be internal or external customers, and actually starting to run it as if it were a business. So, what is the profit and loss statement for a particular service?

Gardner: I suppose that when you need to run it on a profit-and-loss basis, that every bit of efficiency counts, which is a little different from the previous models, right?

Not just a cost model

Van Ash: It is, and it’s also about realizing that it's not just a cost model, but it is very much a business model. That means you need to be actively out there recruiting new customers. You need to be out there marketing yourself. And, that’s one area that IT traditionally has been quite poor at -- recognizing how to structure themselves to deliver as a business.

The technology is really one of the key enablers that come into that and, more importantly, enables you to get scale and standardization across the board, because one of the issues that IT has traditionally faced is that often architecture is forced on them, based on the application selection by the business.

When you start to move into cloud environments, which feature, in many cases, high levels of virtualization, you start to decouple those layers, as the service provider has a much stronger control over what the architecture looks like across the different layers of the stack. This is really one of the areas where cloud is hoping to accelerate this process enormously.

Gardner: Another unfortunate reality today is the lack of dollars. Discretionary spending has pretty much evaporated in many organizations. So for enterprises to move toward these cloud technologies, I would think it needs to be a very rapid return.

Let me take this to Pete Brey. Storage, of course, is a very high-cost area. I would think that moving to the cloud on the storage level might be a strong economic story, at least in terms of ROI.

Brey: Absolutely, and that is indeed one of the key things that we are looking at in HP StorageWorks, developing and delivering to market new classes of scale-out storage. Now, not only do you have your scale-out compute environments, you need to also pay attention to the storage piece of the equation and delivering the platforms. The storage platforms need not only to scale to the degree that we talk about into the petabyte ranges, but they also need to be very simple and easy to use, which will drive down your total cost of ownership and will drive down your administrative costs.

They also deliver a fundamentally new level of affordability that we have never really seen before in the storage marketplace in particular. So these combination of things, scalability, manageability, ease of use and overall affordability, are driving what I consider almost a revolution in the storage marketplace these days. We're working on a lot of different things in the StorageWorks group at HP to deliver on all four of those capabilities.

Gardner: I've heard in many places recently that folks refer to business intelligence (BI) as the “killer application” for cloud. I would think that those petabyte-scale warehouses are a key focus for you. Is that the case?

Brey: Absolutely, that's the case. That’s one of the prime application areas that we hear, as we talk to different customers, but that’s not the only area. We see explosive data growth across the wide range of market segments. This includes everything from the traditional Web-based service providers to the communications, media, and entertainment industries, where they move towards higher and higher definition formats.

Explosion in content

It's driving this explosion to the medical field, where new innovations are happening in that particular space that are also driving an explosion in content. So, it’s all of these factors coming together, and people are demanding new levels of scalability and affordability that are driving these types of storage platforms to support cloud environments.

Gardner: Gary Thome, is there a similar story, when it comes to the infrastructure that supports these cloud fabric and service fabrics? Is there an ROI story here as well?

Thome: Definitely. Very much so. Certainly, when customers are thinking about going to a cloud infrastructure or shared-service model, they really want to look at how they are going to get a payback from that. They're looking at how they can get applications up and running much faster and also how they can do it with less effort and less time. They can redirect administrative time or people time from just simply getting the basic operations, getting the applications up and running, getting the infrastructure up and running for the applications, to doing more innovative things instead.

Customers are looking for those things, as well as the cloud model, a shared-services platform, to be able to get higher utilization out of the equipment. So, they definitely look for those kinds of ROI.

Gardner: Ed Turkel, is there a different sales approach in the enterprise? Someone mentioned earlier that so much of IT has followed on from the applications, but when we think about the architecture of a cloud, we are really thinking about an abstraction of infrastructure that applications can be deployed to and we can get provisions and better efficiency out of. Do you have to go to these enterprises at a different level to sell this? What is the difference between selling to an enterprise and a service provider?

Turkel: It’s definitely selling in a different model. First of all, the approach to selling is much

Customers are looking for those things, as well as the cloud model, a shared-services platform, to be able to get higher utilization out of the equipment.

more of a holistic view of the IT environment and selling a broader solution, than simply going in and selling a server with some storage and so on for a particular application. It tends to touch a broader view of IT, of the data center, and so on.

As was discussed in some of the other comments a moment ago, it has to look at working with the CIO or senior staff within the enterprise IT infrastructure, looking fundamentally at how they change their model of how they deliver their own IT service to their internal customers.

Rather than just providing a platform for an application, they are looking at how they provide an entire service to their customer base by delivering IT as a service. It's fundamentally a different business model for them, even inside their own organizations. So absolutely, it’s a completely different way of selling.

Gardner: Pete Brey, how does this notion of architecture sale, rather than a technology sale, affect the storage business?

Profound effects

Brey: It has very profound effects in terms of the end-to-end application that the customer is using and understanding the unique requirements of those applications and how that gets driven down into the technology that supports those requirements. So, it's a fundamental shift in the way we think about it and the solutions that we deliver from a storage standpoint into the marketplace.

Gardner: Tim Van Ash, management, of course, is a crucial part of this. But, we're going to be managing, many of us analysts predict, across heterogeneous environments of on-premises, delivered cloud services, traditional legacy services and applications, and then the third-party, outside applications.

As enterprises consider these technologies, it seems to me important to consider how you would manage them not just on their own, but in the context of a larger cloud ecology.

Van Ash: The thing that we're seeing from our customers is how they extend enterprise control in the cloud, because cloud has the potential to be the new silo in the overall architecture. As you said, in a heterogeneous environment, you potentially have multiple cloud providers. In fact, you almost certainly will have a multi-sourced environment.

So, how do you extend the capabilities, the control, and the governance across your enterprise in

If you look at many of the cloud providers, what they've done is they've implemented a great deal of resilience in their application environment, in a sense, moving the issues of resiliency away from the hardware and more into software.

the cloud to ensure that you are delivering the most agile and the most cost effective solution, whether it would be in-house or leveraging cloud to accelerate those values?

What we're seeing from customers is a demand for existing enterprise tools to expand their role and to manage both private cloud and public cloud technologies. One of the big steps that HP has taken this year is enabling both of the services. The Software-as-a-Service Group delivers IT management as a service, which can manage both your private cloud capabilities and your public cloud capabilities, and manage the security performance and service-level aspects around both your internal and your external consumption.

Gardner: Ed Turkel, when we think about taking these technologies from what had been a service provider environment into enterprises, I think the requirements on service providers are often higher than enterprises are accustomed to, in terms of availability and reliability. Is this proving a benefit that they recognize? What's the transition, in terms of the management and requirements around performance?

Turkel: In those environments, the way that they look at management of the environment, the resilience or reliability of individual servers, storage, and so on, is done a little differently, partially because of the scale of the environments that they are creating.

If you look at many of the cloud providers, what they've done is they've implemented a great deal of resilience in their application environment, in a sense, moving the issues of resiliency away from the hardware and more into software. When you look at an environment that is as large as what they are doing, it's somewhat natural to expect that components of that environment will fail at some level of frequency. If you have tens of thousands of servers, or tens of thousands of disk drives, some number will fail on a somewhat regular basis.

Resiliency capabilities

So, their software infrastructure has to be able to deal with that. Many of the very largest of the cloud providers have implemented resiliency capabilities into their software infrastructure to allow for that. It fundamentally changes things, because of the nature of the scale of the environment. It also changes the way that we work with those same folks in terms of how we provide things like technical services and break-fix services into those environments.

You start looking at technical service from a different viewpoint. You don't send a field service engineer into those environments every time a component fails. You do it more on a scheduled basis or, in many instances, some of those customers do their own maintenance and simply maintain a parts depot within their environment to get replacement parts. Again, it's fundamentally different because of the scale that they are operating at.

Gardner: Well, what's interesting to me is that we can take what is an expectation and requirement in a business-to-consumer environment, like a service provider deals with, and can apply that now to a business-to-business type of applications or requirements, but you couldn't do vice-versa.

Turkel: No, I think it does go somewhat in both directions. Enterprise IT environments, as they

The technology that HP has been able to provide to them has helped them significantly in achieving those levels of productivity.

are consolidating their environments into a single large infrastructure, rather than the application silos we touched on a little bit earlier, they are dealing with some of the same issues of scale. The way that they service and the way that they design the environment has to be somewhat similar to those cloud providers.

But then, they are delivering all of that as a service to their customer. So, as you say, it becomes more of a business-to-consumer way of delivering their services rather than, as you suggested, the business-to-business model, or a less direct non-service oriented approach to doing it.

Gardner: Let's look at some examples of where HP has brought some of these technologies into enterprises and what some of the paybacks have been, I don't know whether you can name companies, but maybe a use-case scenario. Pete Brey, can you provide an example on what some of the paybacks have been?

Brey: Absolutely. In fact, there is a very notable example that we announced this past summer, a partnership that we've developed with DreamWorks Animation. DreamWorks is using HP storage to host their animation environments, and this would be an example of an enterprise building up a cloud-based environment.

They have multiple locations. When they're working on a film, they have animators spread across geographic boundaries, across countries and continents. They have a need to virtualize those environments into an enterprise cloud-like setting for their animation environments. They are building this solution, as we speak, using HP components, HP servers, HP storage, and software to link it altogether.

For them, it's really a great opportunity to evolve their infrastructure to meet some of the new requirements that they have around high-definition content and also around rapidly increasing their productivity, in terms of the number of films that they can turn out in a given amount of time. In the not-too-distant past, they were able to produce two, three, maybe four films a year, where now they have been able to double that.

The technology that HP has been able to provide to them has helped them significantly in achieving those levels of productivity. So, it's really an exciting relationship with DreamWorks. And, they are very excited to be working with us too, helping us drive our own cloud strategies around things like key-based storage archive systems, some really new and innovative features that are going to make storage and compute environments even simpler to use in these cloud environments.

Gardner: Gary, what about some of your products and strategies for applying to enterprises? Is there a Matrix story in terms of examples of undergirding cloud-type environments?

Cloud-like experience

Thome: Yes, very much so. BladeSystem Matrix is designed to help customers, provide a cloud-like experience for their enterprise applications.

For many enterprises, unlike the cloud that Ed was talking about earlier where they are able to put things like the resilience and scalability into the software, many enterprises don't own all their applications, and there are a variety of different applications on a variety of different operating systems.

So, they really need a more flexible platform that gives them an abstraction between the applications and the hardware itself. Products like BladeSystem Matrix, with technologies such as our Insight Orchestration and our Virtual Connect technology, allows customers to get that abstraction.

They can turn on applications very quickly, and then be able to scale them up and scale them down very quickly as well, without having to rely on specialized software to do it. The servers themselves are doing it.

We've got one company, Micros-Fidelio which itself is a service provider in the hospitality

One of the most exciting examples that I have seen recently has been taking the enterprise technology around provisioning of both physical and virtual servers in a self-service and a dynamic fashion and taking it to the service provider.

industry. They have a need to be able to stand up applications very quickly for their customers. Technology, such as Insight Orchestration, gives them the capability to do that very quickly.

Gardner: Tim Van Ash, do you have any examples of the use of these technologies in the enterprise environments?

Van Ash: From HP Software's perspective, this has been a core business of ours for some time and there are numerous examples. One of the most exciting examples that I have seen recently has been taking the enterprise technology around provisioning of both physical and virtual servers in a self-service and a dynamic fashion and taking it to the service provider.

Verizon recently announced one of their cloud offerings, which is Compute as a Service, and that's all based on the business service automation technology that was developed for the enterprise.

It was developed to provide data-center automation, providing provisioning and dynamic provisioning to physical and logical servers, networks, storage, and tying it altogether through run book automation, through what we call Operations Orchestration.

Verizon has taken that technology and used that to build a cloud service that they are now delivering to their customers. So, we're seeing service providers adopting some of the existing enterprise technology, and really taking it in a new direction.

Gardner: What's interesting, along the lines of what Ed Turkel was saying, is that this is a two-way street where you can apply underlying cloud fabric. That's a fascinating observation -- that is to say, between the types of technologies we would expect in an enterprise IT environment and the types that we would expect in a service provider environment.

Significant changes

Van Ash: While we are seeing some significant changes in both the economics model and the scale, in many ways, cloud is really building on a series of innovations that we have been seeing for some time, as IT moves toward more of the utility type model around this.

It's utility, both in terms of being able to take a power cord and plug it into the socket, but also utility in the sense that you are enabling customers to do many of the things that, once upon a time, would require them to open a ticket and have teams of people manually working on their activities in the background. Now, they can do this in a self-service fashion that really ties all these processes together in an automated way.

So, while cloud is currently going in a very exciting direction, it really represents an evolution of many of the technologies that we at HP have focused on now for the last 20 years.

Gardner: It sounds almost as if cloud computing, as a vision, is providing somewhat of a unifying theory around many of the different aspects of computing and technology development over the past decades. A unifying theory is something, of course, has been elusive in the realm of physics.

Okay, Ed Turkel, on this notion of an example, do you have any of the use-case scenarios or actual companies that you could offer in terms of this trend?

Turkel: Well, we're somewhat challenged in being able to talk about some of the leading cloud

We're also seeing some interesting crossover from another part of our market that has been very traditionally a scale-out market. That's the high-performance computing or technical computing market . . .

providers that we're actually selling to, because virtually every one of them will not allow us to talk about them for the fundamental reason that their IT infrastructure is part of their unique value add and part of their value proposition to their own customers. So, it is very competitive within each of those environments. They tend not to let us mention them by name.

But, if you look across the set of customers that we talk to, for example, we have one that's a leading email house. Another is a leading social networking company, and so on. I can't name names and I can't tell you exactly how they're using our systems, but some of those environments are again very, very large.

We're also seeing some interesting crossover from another part of our market that has been very traditionally a scale-out market. That's the high-performance computing (HPC) or technical computing market, where we are seeing a number of large sites that have been delivering technical computing as a service to their customers for some time, way back when they called it time sharing. Then, it became utility computing or grid, and so on.

Now, they're more and more delivering their services via cloud models. In fact, they're working very closely with us on a joint-research endeavor that we have between HP Labs, Yahoo, and Intel called the Cloud Computing Test Bed, more recently called the Open Cirrus Project.

Model is expanding

It's where some of our largest HPC customers are implementing their scale-out environments as cloud services where they are offering high performance computing environments as a service to enterprise customers, to academic customers, and so on, over the Internet using that same cloud model. We're seeing this model expanding, and beyond just those big cloud providers into some of those traditional HPC environments.

Gardner: I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. We've been discussing how technologies that have supported cloud, utility, and service provider infrastructure for years, are beginning to work their way into enterprises under the category of cloud computing but giving them some technical underpinnings for new business models, approaches, and efficiencies.

To help us discuss this, we've been joined by Pete Brey, worldwide marketing manager for HP StorageWorks group. I appreciate your input, Pete.

Brey: Thank you.

Gardner: We were also joined by Ed Turkel, manager of business development for HP Scalable Computing and Infrastructure. Thanks.

Turkel: Thank you.

Gardner: And, Tim Van Ash, director of SaaS products at the HP Software and Solutions group. Thank you, Tim.

Van Ash: Thanks very much, Dana.

Gardner: And also, Gary Thome, chief strategist for infrastructure software and blades. Thank you, Gary.

Thome: Thanks for the time.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You have been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. Thanks for listening and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard.

Free Offer: Get a complimentary copy of the new book Cloud Computing For Dummies courtesy of Hewlett-Packard at www.hp.com/go/cloudpodcastoffer.

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast that examines how enterprises are increasingly focused and ready for delivery and consumption of cloud-based infrastructure and other services. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2009. All rights reserved.