The 451 Group Grids: the means to what 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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• 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
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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
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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 dont 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 wont 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/policy

• Problem
• 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 todays 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 cant 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?