Interesting Reading: the Dead Sea effect

Came across an interesting blog post tiled: The Wetware Crisis: the Dead Sea effect

It's an interesting post using the Dead Sea and it's evaporation water and concentration of salt as a metaphor of certain IT environments. The evaporation was the 'good' iIT people leaving and the salt was the 'less capable' IT staff staying. The net effect being eventually it will become too salty to support life (a well functioning IT environment). It was interesting to me because I've been in those situations and have watched it happen. Talented person after talented person leaves and what's left behind is a group of people who can't get a project across the finish line. Or if they do, it's way over budget, over time, under featured and under tested.

The comments on slashdot and in the blog post itself are also worth browsing. There's some interesting nuggets. Like this one from wjaf who takes exception to being called residue, since he's one who stayed behind and considers himself water. Well, the article never said the sea was dry and all salt. And by sticking around and "...we work our backsides off keeping the company afloat." he's enabled the problem to continue. A comment by Will.Rubin is also off the mark a bit. Mr Webster responds quite well to his comment, I feel.

One thing that strikes me funny is is notion of "TEPES" - Talent, Education, Professionalism, Experience, and Skill. When I read that, i read TERPES (an inserted R). One of the many local sports teams around here are the Univ. of Maryland Terrapins, abreviated as Terps. And then Terpes sends me down a childish rhyming path.

Nothing in IT is every this cut and dried. Nor is a salt-free IT shop possible. So it's important to remember it's an analogy. It's used as an allegory about IT hiring and talent retention.

The Golden Answer for Consulting...

In the pre-consulting days I usually had a strong opinion about how, what, why and when things should be done. But lately I'm starting to find it's the same answer to every question. This answer is amazing in it's effectiveness and simplicity. It also really helps me to ensure I'm giving the customer what they want. That answer?

It Depends.

Just that simple. Should we go with lots of low end servers, or fewer mid-range/high end servers? Should we use tape backup or replication to migrate the data? HP or IBM? Solaris, AIX or Linux?

It Depends.

It works so wonderfully because it makes people explain why they're making the choices they're making. They never want to simply know if they should go with choice A or choice B. They could flip a coin, have a google-fight or pick from a Gartner quadrant if the choices were that that easy. But things are never that easy, it depends. It depends on a lot of factors and their not all weighted equally and they're weighted differently by different stake holders. And just to make things even more fun, consultants have their own personal preferences and biases.

It's the conversation that ensues that's the real answer. The conversation where you find out what's driving the choices. The conversation is where you separate the must-haves from the nice-to-haves. The conversation is what makes or breaks things. So is it an oversimplification to say that Consulting is the art of conversation?

It Depends.

Oracle's VM

Well, it had to happen. Oracle is jumping into the VM/Hypervisor arena. Have they learned nothing from Unbreakable Linux? Yeah, sure, you can say you have a virtualization strategy, but where's the value you offer?

http://www.oracle.com/technologies/virtualization/index.html

They simply put an oracle sticker on Zen and offer oracle support instead of Zen. I guess if you like the single neck to choke approach it could have value. And DBA's do tend to be the most kool-aid drinking group of users, so maybe it will have value, but I'm of the same mind as the Storagezilla blog. And to sum that it's HUH???

Grid services/utility computing is going to take off... in 10 years.

*NOTE*I originally wrote this Sunday - May 15, 2005

Some thoughts on grid and utility computing....

I think grid and utility computing is going to take off. In ten years. The pieces are starting to come out. They just don't knit tightly together yet. Also, people have to be convinced that this will work, it's secure and it'll save them money.

For example, in the solaris world today, if someone had a solaris 10 N1/grid/container/zone/what-ever-name-the-marketing-folks-dream-up-next world, you'd take a relatively low end machine, install solaris 10 on it, create a zone with zoneadm, install your software into the zone, test and validate the configuration and move that zone onto the grid. On the grid the end users would access what ever web server, app sever or database server you had running in it. Getting resource bound? Pay the grid owner to add additional resources of what ever you need. Maybe your already consuming the entire V890 you're running on, so you take a maintenance window to shut down your zone, deport the diskgroup (veritas lingo) and import the DG on a bigger piece of iron. Presto, no re-validation on the new hardware, no missing conf file or cron job that people forgot to tell you about. Because it's all in the container/zone it won't get lost. Because the hardware is abstracted, it's guaranteed to work. No risk! This can be done today, but no one, that I'm aware of, is selling "grid" services. I'm sure some one would do it for you, but today you'd probably be their only customer and everything would be a custom job just for you. So they'd bake in the growth costs into their fees and it probably wouldn't be any cheaper than doing it yourself, today.

Now, here's where the future starts the get real interesting. In the short term, I seep companies making their own production grids. Out of a cluster of mid-to-high end severs, say 2900's or what not. They use Sun or Veritas clustering to manage who runs where. This should happen in a year or two. This is where someone will see the cash to be made by running one gigantic grid for everyone to outsource to. But before that can happen, the security of grids needs to be improved and rigorously proven. The next piece is being able to move a container from one box to another with out shutting it down. Veritas is going to have this "real soon" I believe. Once their "UpScale" product, which they have working, is released you will be able to do just that. The next piece comes from Sun. Sun needs to make the servers meld into one seemless machine no matter how many actual boxes you have. Some of this is close already, but there's a long way to go. I'd say Solaris 11 at best. That feels like 2008 to 2010 to me right now. There is a big question if Sun can hold on that long.

Do I see this happening in the Linux space? Yeah, but only after Sun or someone else does it first. It' be foolish for the linux community do invest any significant effort into this idea until it starts to prove a viable model. Otherwise you tie up the kernel with lots of code that may serve no purpose.

Just a thought,

Rich

Long Tail Business Modles

Today I read an article on businessshrink.biz: http://businessshrink.biz/psychologyofbusiness/2007/10/02/internet-business-is-killing-the-8020-rule/ and it got me thinking about it a bit more. I don't really think it applies to the internet the same way it might to the brick and mortar world. It was interesting to learn about Amazon's success with obscure book titles. I guess the real link between the 80-20 rule and the web is it finally makes it possible to make money on the 20 rather than the 80, which allows you to stick a little bit more to principle rather than cow-towing to the masses.

Software as a Service

Just some ramblings about SaaS

I saw a job oportuinity for a company that had a requirement for being in a SaaS environment. SaaS? Never heard of it. Well, turns out I have, just didn't have a name for it. Software as a Service the 'wetlands' spin on the 'swamp' of ASP. I like the idea of calling it SaaS. It blends nicely into the idea of a SOA enterprise architecture. If the EA is done right you should be able to add and remove your own SOA components and SaaS providers. Where things get interesting in the SaaS space to me is the question of data ownership, data security and data transportability.

If I'm a provider, ownership is a simple ToS in the contract. Security makes or breaks me. Transportability, the ability to move data from my company to that of my competitor or bring it in house, is a double edged sword, with the sharper edge pointed towards me. It cuts me in that it allows my clients to easily jump to a provider with a lower TCO. It gives them leverage to threaten to leave. It cuts my compeitition and brings revenue when I use it to take customers away from my competition (even when the competition is the customer's in house staff) and it has a potential for revenue by providing professional services engagements to do the migrations of data between systems. It's the classic line for Zoro about a sword. It's like a bird, hold it to tight and it dies. Hold it too loose and it flies away. It also means you need to compete on innovation. You have to be faster, cheaper or better to win business. With new startups coming around every day, it means you have to keep a full stable of developers and are always preparing for 'the next big release'. It's a fun environment to work in, but it also has a burn out rate.

If I'm the client, data ownership needs to be crystal clear up front. I know where were some CRM type SaaS providers where the data belonged to the provider, not the client. Leaving them meant they took ownership of your data. You could take a copy of I'm sure, but they had a copy too, which they could do lord knows what with. Security needs to be proven. Independant audit reports and certifications are crucial. I need to know an insider in the company isn't going to sell my data, what ever it may be, to my competitors or the press. The data portability is a pretty big issue. I need to be able to easily move to another provider if better oportunities present themselves, the vendor goes out of business or is acquired. I need to be able to move it quickly to limit disruptions to my end users and to provide continuity.

I think as high bandwidth connectivity becomes cheaper and faster the SaaS market will continue to grow and be very vibrant. What I primarily see is niche or small segment SaaS providers so far. Recruiting/HR, CRM, desktop apps and the like doing well. If continues to prove itself, eventually larger segments of back office software services will be provided until the whole data-center is external. Another interesting mash-up will be when SaaS vendors start melding with on-sight managed service and outsource providers. They could then begin to provide ala carte plans, leaving customers to pick in choose what services they want to keep in house and what they want to just pay someone else to deal with.

New (to me) security setting in Sol 10

I'm installing Solaris 10 Update 4 onto a VM on my macbook pro. Done it a bunch of times, sol 9, sol 10, opensolaris, etc. This time I noticed a different screen in the install process:

It now asks you for the initial security posture. So basically I'll have only SSH on by default. Not too shabby! Not sure how long this has been in Solaris 10, but it's a welcome change.