Dell and VMware invited a diverse group of people to come to San Francisco for a day to have an open discussion around a number of different cloud-related topics.  I jumped at the chance to go and participate.  The event was live streamed on Justin.tv for people to view and we had a healthy dose of participation from twitter. The discussion was quite intense and lively.  David Linthicum moderated the two sessions in the morning and Robert Scoble came in to moderate the sessions in the afternoon.

There were four sessions, Mobile and the Cloud, The Business of Enterprise Cloud, Influence of Government on Cloud Adoption and The Future of Cloud Computing.  The opinions were flying fast and furious with a lot of gems said on Twitter.

So what were my highlights?

There was a clear divide in the conversation about cloud adoption between those who deal with more web-centric workloads and legacy enterprise workloads.  The problem was those two views were trying to discuss opposing views which really apply differently to each side.  There’s also a strong view on governments and law being huge potential barriers to the economic benefit of cloud.  We spent a lot of time discussing the balance of privacy and openness as things like Big Data make the aggregation of personal information more visible.

I think Dell and VMware did a amazing job putting the event together.  My only feedback is that sometimes it seemed like the gloom-and-doom chamber and it would’ve been good to have a couple of people on the panel from the enterprise and agile startup world who talked about cloud successes.  It was great to be part of the discussions which many incredible individuals.  I’ve included the list of attendees below.

• Lydia Leong (@cloudpundit) – Research VP, Gartner
• Krishnan Subramanian (@krishnan) -  Principal Analyst, Rishidot Research
• John Willis (@botchagalupe) – VP Client Services, enStratus
• David Linthicum (@DavidLinthicum) – CTO and Founder, Blue Mountain Labs
• Dave Asprey (@daveasprey) – VP Cloud Security, Trend Micro
• Nati Shalom (@natishalom) – CTO and Founder, GigaSpaces
• Jim Plamondon (@JimPlamondon) – Director Developer Experience, Rackspace
• Jeanna Matthews (@jeanna_matthews) – Associate Professor, Clarkson University
• Dave McCrory  (@mccrory) – Cloud Innovator, Cloud Foundry
• JP Morgenthal (@jpmorgenthal) – Technology Evangelist, EMC
• Derrick Harris (@derrickharris) – Blogger, GigaOm
• Ed Saipetch (@edsai) -  Sr. Technical  Director, Joyent
• Margaret Dawson (@seattledawson) – VP Marketing, Symform
• Richard Mark Soley - Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of OMG.org
• Stephen Spector (@SpectorAtDell) – Cloud Evangelist, Dell

#Disclaimer – Dell and VMware paid for my travel and accommodations for this trip.

As some of you may have heard, I’m leaving Joyent.  I’ve learned a lot along the way and enjoyed the experience immensely.  Jason Hoffman and the team there have been incredible to work with.  We accomplished quite a bit while I was there including building a channel, starting an adoption program, deploying SmartDataCenter in major enterprises as both green field non-legacy clouds and internal IT clouds.  Telefonica just stood up their public cloud offering which is based on Joyent’s SmartDataCenter.  It’s been a great run.

So where am I off to now?  I’m headed to Inktank.  What does Inktank do?  Inktank delivers support and professional services for Ceph which is an opensource scale-out storage technology that provides object, file and block services.  Ceph is cloud platform agnostic as well.  Yes, I’m headed a bit back towards the storage world.  I’ll be working with customers and alliance partners to help them build and deploy solutions based around Ceph.  They’re based in LA and opening up an office in Sunnyvale so you’ll still see me around the Bay area a bit.

I’ve been working closely with a large telco to deploy SmartDataCenter from Joyent and it hasn’t been much different from other journeys to evolve development, operations and IT in general.  What I notice most is the agents of change versus the agents of same.

There’s a constant fixation on the things an individual feels they control in their environment.  If I’m the network admin, I control everything around network connectivity, security and operations.  If I’m the storage admin, I control everything around information storage space the organization can consume.  When elements of change come into a person’s world there tends to be an immediate dismissal of the force of change.

Here’s the thing.  I’ve noticed that there are a handful of people who want to be agents of change and a handful of those who don’t.  The agents of change aren’t asking you to throw away all you know and give up the responsibility you’ve always had.  They’re asking you to be a part of a movement.

Why do I waste my breath on this?  Because people still need periodic reminders that we’re in one of the most exciting times in technology.  It’s important because being an “Agent of Same” has the potential to screw not only your organization over but your brothers and sisters in technology as well.

I spent the a couple of days hanging out with Greg Knieriemen, Christina Weil and Gina Rosenthal at Dell Storage Forum 2011 last week.  The main driver was meeting people and doing Infosmack Live.

It was a lot of fun meeting many new faces and talking to Dell product and executive teams.  There were a number of things I was impressed with.  The first is that Dell is doing very well at is fostering a community.  The conference was small and Gina along with her team did awesome at pulling things together.  There was a lot of accessibility and comparatively more so than I had experienced with other vendors.

I got to do the Silicon Angle TV thing again and it was a blast.  John McArthur and Cali Lewis interviewed me about Cloud in general.  I spent a bit of time talking about Joyent and the things I’m seeing in both public and private cloud.  You can see the spot here.

Dell is doing well is not letting innovation with their acquisitions die.  That was evident in their FS7500 NAS release which integrates Exanet with their Equalogic arrays.  True to form, it’s easy to use just as Equalogic has been in the past.  I’m sure Dell will integrate this with their Compellent storage as well.  This will suit the markets Dell serves very well.  The other big theme was fluid data which continues the theme that data should be able to federate between storage platforms.  It will be interesting to see how this comes to market.

There are still some challenges in front of Dell though like selling all of their storage lines in a single sales motion instead of being fragmented.  They also need to ensure that Dell partners don’t cut out Compellent partners from their relationships with customers.

I spent 15 or so minutes talking to Michael Dell while we were at the Infosmack Live event.  The things that I tried to impress is that they need to keep innovating.  I also mentioned that they should offer a full stack play similar to Vblock, Flexpod or HP Matrix.  I know they’ve known about this for a long time but there still isn’t a Dell answer and there should be.

Overall it was great to be a part of the event and I felt like Dell wasn’t languishing even if you look at IDC numbers.  Now it’s up to them to execute.  Hats off to all the Dell people who pulled off a nice intimate conference!  It was wonderful to meet everyone.

I’ve been at Joyent for nearly four months now.  Time is flying.  It’s been busy.  What have I been doing?  I’ve been busy driving disruption and it’s a blast.  Everyone wants to talk to us.  Sometimes they understand immediately how we’re different and other times it takes time to sink in.

I’m meeting with a lot of the same customers I met with when I was at EMC.  Vblock’s and VMware solve challenges with existing legacy workloads and Joyent is there to help transition to the new way people are deploying applications.  The disruption in the enterprise has never been as evident as it has been now.  The innovation groups within enterprises want ITaaS and don’t care about the infrastructure sitting below because they’re designing high availability and scalability into their applications.  The IT groups struggle with this because they’ve spent years choosing standards, policies and procedures.  Joyent delivers a platform that delivers burstability, fast I/O and introspection.  That should be a requirement in any platform used to deliver applications, period.  Now add full-blown RESTful APIs that enable integration, orchestration and auto-scaling.  This means IT groups can integrate their processes while still giving true ITaaS.  It’s a powerful cocktail.

Enough about the product for now.  So where have I been?  I’ve been traveling a lot aside from the last couple of weeks.  A lot of customer meetings and then Interop in May.  Where will I be over the coming months?

June 5th-9th: Dell Storage Forum w/ the Infosmack crew

June 22nd-23rd: GigaOM Structure

August: Defcon

September: Bitnorth (Awesome crowd)

Before starting at Joyent, I followed them and the evolution of their platform for years.  How they tackled scalability and instrumentation has always appealed to me.  I’ve realized the platform covers a lot of use cases and is extremely compelling.  I’ve talked previously about new ways to solve legacy enterprise infrastructure issues but there other ways of handling the challenges of newer more distributed workloads.

Here’s how Jason Hoffman (friend and Founder/Chief Scientist at Joyent) puts it:

The Physical Machine business is a “machine” business. The Virtual Machine business is still a “machine” business. The virtual machine is not the abstraction that is equivalent to a packet in the network. Fundamentally, being tied to a machine matters to a person, it doesn’t matter to an application and in fact causes there to be hits in performance, scale and it’s all a black box (can’t comprehend everything).

We come from networking and ask ourselves, “How can we extend the days when the cloud we drew was just the network and enable the same abstractions, economics and models into servers? Into the rest of the datacenter? So that we may have the same type of multitenancy for compute that we have for networking.”

What is Joyent’s stack?  It’s a platform first and foremost.  What’s part of the platform?

This image from a slide deck lays it out.

A SmartOS kernel – It’s based on unix and all the unimportant fat has been cut from it.  It’s lean, scalable and provides QoS *and* introspection all throughout the stack.  Yes, we’re a software development company and we have kick ass kernel hackers that are brilliant.  We also have some unbelievable UI/UX folks on board who know how to make stuff *usable*.  Bryan Cantrill of Dtrace fame and formally of Sun/Oracle leads engineering.

A platform to build on – What do you want to run?  Do you want to run a Windows/Linux/WhateverVM?  Go ahead.  We can’t provide you deep introspection but into the application but we can tell you what your VM is doing.  Use SmartMachines (container-based single kernel “virtualization) and you get introspection at ALL levels.  Why would you use the native container-based SmartMachines?  Because, what you care about is applications, not what OS is running underneath.  You want to run Apache, Nginx with CouchDB, MongoDB, MySQL, Oracle or Riak go for it.  Oh and by the way, when your app blows up because you rushed the code, we have the diagnostics and visuals that can meaningfully tell you why your app is caving.  Can you run Java on us?  You can. It’s that simple.  You can build out templates and deploy them easily. This is cloud.  It’s ITaaS. Pull the trigger and it’s yours.

Now… for the really cool stuff. Ryan Dahl at Joyent developed something (open-sourced) called node.js. What is it?  It’s server-side javascript which is a 4gl language.  It’s essentially PaaS.  You use git to push your code and it’s up and running in the cloud.  Why did Joyent do that?Because at the end of the day when you need insane bandwidth and high transaction capabilities, you’re willing to sacrifice legacy capabilities to get the performance you need.  Not only that but node.js is tiny, lightweight and can run on the server or something as small as a cell phone.

Let’s boil it down.  Is Joyent SmartDataCenter a replacement for VMware?  Yes and no.  At service providers like Verizon, Terremark and many others, it can be a compliment to an existing IaaS offering. The main target isn’t legacy enterprise use cases that need HA at the IaaS level.  But it’s a very good fit for workloads that need a lot of elasticity and dynamic scalability.  Instead of constraining resources, a user can use as much of the box that is free while still preserving QoS to the other instances.

Has anyone used this stuff? Yes, Joyent has run its own cloud for 6 years and we figured out that having other SPs deploy Joyent as a cloud solution is something we’re willing to tackle.  It’s what LinkedIn, Gilt group, Disney, Facebook developers and many others have been using for awhile now.

If you’re more curious about Joyent’s approach, you can read more here.

One of my best friends, Erin Banks, and I always talk about how life is about crossing bridges.  I’ve just crossed another bridge.  With a lot of heartache and turmoil but much excitement, I’ve accepted the role of Senior Technical Director at Joyent.  I’ve always wanted to help guide cloud strategy and this puts me close to the driver’s seat.

The next chapter…

I can’t express how excited I am to join Joyent.  I’ve always been a geek at heart and have loved Solaris, Dtrace, ZFS and all of the insane innovation Sun Microsystems did back in the day.  Joyent built their platform on Opensolaris but have hired much of the innovators that were previously at Sun/Oracle on the core elements that matter. Years ago I started following the Joyent folks and I was always impressed at how they innovated and had a vision of what they saw cloud to be.  They have amassed an incredible amount of talent and I’ve always had a ton of respect for Jason Hoffman and David Paul Young for their vision.  Now I get to play a big big part in making that vision become pervasive.  There will be more coming as I get planted at Joyent.

I am so thankful for the opportunities that I was given at EMC beginning with Aaron Chaisson hiring me last year.  He’s a phenomenal individual who let me thrive in the beginning and helped me in any way he could.  I joined the vSpecialist team when it was roughly 24 people and it has grown to over 100 which is representative of the success the team has.  I learned a phenomenal amount from the likes of Chad Sakac, Erin Banks, Justin Lauer, Jonathan Donaldson, Tommy Trogden, Rick Scherer, Scott Lowe, Jim Ruddy, Nick Weaver, Sharon Isaacson, John Avery, Denis Guyadeen, Dennis Hoffman, Chris Birdwell, Kevin Zawodzynski, Ben Dunning, Wade O’Harrow and too many others to name.  I’ve mentioned this before and I’ll mention it again, you become part of a family and it’s an unbelievable feeling knowing that your brothers and sisters on the team will lay down on train tracks for you.  It’s been an amazing time and a pleasure working at EMC.  I’ll miss it but I’m looking forward to tackling some insane challenges ahead.

I had the opportunity to deliver a keynote on “Cloud Computing and the Public Sector” late last week to 225 GIS (Geographic Information Systems) professionals in Frankfort, Kentucky.  Trisha Brush was kind enough to invite me after we met at CloudCamp Cincinnati.  I tried to keep it at a high level but then drill down to some particular use cases.  I also tried to deal with some of the sticky issues like governance and compliance.

The two points I emphasized during the keynote are:

1. The Cloud is an enabler.  It lowers the cost of entry for disruptive technology.  A use case example is using Elastic Map Reduce to solve huge problems we can’t easily or inexpensively solve today with traditional enterprise methods.
2. GIS and mapping are extremely relevant these days. As admins, directors and users, they should work with developers  to create innovative mashup-style apps.  This can help disseminate information to wide masses or create revenue streams from a constituent and commercial perspective.

You can find the keynote preso here.

Trisha borrowed a lot of the CloudCamp unconference format for the KAMP Summit which worked well.  I also found out that they had an App Contest (Desktop and Web) similar to a sprint during StartupWeekend.  I spent most of the day there and this is what I walked away with:

• Cloud in the public sector is still very new, yes it’s a journey
• Unconference (a la Barcamp) continues to work well as a format
• The midwest has a lot of innovation in it
• Can’t underestimate the value of leadership and community (Trisha did an amazing job)

I had to leave during the Unpanel but I was getting a lot of questions about Cloud in general (security, resiliency, etc) and I tried to answer as much as I could.  I also met Angie Jennings of Swova who specializes in ArcGIS implementations.  Her company is also one of the first to help customers take their GIS solutions into the cloud from an IaaS perspective.

If you’ve got questions about the preso or cloud in general, feel free to comment below.

 

Everyone talks about the consumerization of IT and how end-users are demanding enterprise support of things like iPhones, iPads and many other pieces of technology.  People want to be able to consume IT as a resource on any device or platform they have.  This is happening between enterprise hardware and software vendors and service providers.

I’ve met with quite a few them recently and they usually fall into two camps.  Ones who have invested and attempted to develop their own intellectual property and others who have leveraged economies of scale and rely on vendors to supply the IP.  There are exceptions to this rule of course.  The first camp is what I want to focus on.

Here is what they want:

• Align with my business and go-to-market strategy
• Don’t can your offering with SP-focused marketing materials if it can’t honor the promises
• Have hardware and software with open interfaces
• Have well-documented interfaces
• Be agile in the adoption of new interfaces

These conversations tend to revolve around the self-service portals many of the pure-play service providers have developed.  They don’t want a canned out of the box offering, they want to be able to provision and orchestrate the compute, network and storage layer through things like SOAP and REST protocols.  When you develop these interfaces and hand them over to the developers, strange things happen.  Nick “@lynxbat” Weaver exemplifies this.  He isn’t a developer by day but you give him some APIs and he can do crazy things on a plane like write a vSphere plugin that allows VM teleportation with our (EMC’s) VPLEX product.

Now I’m not ignoring the need for software development lifecycle management, version control.  Those are all important.  The thing is that the “neat stuff” us and our customers do can only get better if we open up with good APIs that have a happy balance between standardization and cutting-edge agility.

Why do I beat this drum?  Because it’s a win for enterprise hardware/software vendors and our customers.  What is most exciting about this is that I’ve beat this drum inside of EMC, not as a VP of strategic direction but as a joe-schmoe vSpecialist.  What has come out of it?  A lot of people have listened and it is a huge priority.  I’ve said it before on twitter but one of the best things about working at EMC is that the organization is huge but very flat.  The reality is that I’ve been able to nudge an aircraft carrier with the help of others and start to change course.  This isn’t a post about why I love working at EMC but I think it’s a darn compelling reason.  Our work has just begun…

Here’s the story to how the infamous “Edsai” and banana bread thing came to be.  Back in April, Vaughn Stewart of Netapp posted a blog entry about “blogging with integrity” that went right after Chad Sakac.  It created a bit of tension that frustrated a lot of people.  Instead of going negative I asked myself what would diffuse the tension.  I get this kick-ass toffee banana bread delivered weekly from