Simon Bramfitt

Methinks, it is like a weasel

Given the prevailing sentiment expressed by the media of the recent T-Mobile Sidekick data loss episode it looks as though the majority of the journalistic profession slept through their English Lit. classes, or at least those that covered Hamlet. Shakespeare it would seem had a better understanding of the amorphous adaptive nature of clouds than those who pronounced this episode as a blow to the adoption of cloud computing. 

Hamlet: Do you see that cloud, that's almost in shape like a camel? 

Polonius: By the mass, and 't is like a camel, indeed. 

Hamlet: Methinks, it is like a weasel. 

Polonius: It is backed like a weasel. 

Hamlet: Or, like a whale? 

Polonius: Very like a whale. 

Hamlet Act III Scene II

The brittle unyielding certitude of the failure to backup your data, more reminiscent of a mountain than the cloud hiding it, is a failure of process not architecture or technology.

Is Citrix getting ready license HDX?

In order for virtual hosted desktops to succeed in business (note, that's business not IT) there are only three things that really matter, applications have to work, the user experience has to approximate that of a local desktop and it has to be cost justified.  We don't need to spend much time thinking about the first or last items, if it adds no business value and finishes up costing more than a managed local desktop we can't justify implementation, and we know that if an application works on a local desktop it will function just fine on a VHD desktop guest.  That only leaves user experience. While IT users understand and are willing accommodate an interface that is slow to respond when remoting into a server or desktop for  support or troubleshooting activities, we have to acknowledge that the experience can be frustrating. Offering such an experience to business users will rapidly lead to  unemployment. 

The yardstick that all remote application delivery solutions are measured against is clearly Citrix's HDX protocol. It's still not perfect, but we all know that it's pretty good. Regardless of the many marketing driven claims offered by its competitors Citrix has always maintained a comfortable lead in its ability to deliver the best user experience regardless of network bandwidth or latency. The problem with being the technology leader though, is that after a while it becomes increasing harder to innovate and maintain the size of your lead. Of late, alternatives to HDX have come to market that approach the user experience offered by HDX albeit with some compromises around platform (Teradici), low bandwidth/high latency performance, or ability to deliver multimedia content. So while Citrix still maintain some degree of advantage at this point the alternatives to ICA/HDX are becoming increasing attractive, and when Vmware's partnership with Teradici deliver's a software implementation of PCoIP  Citrix 'could' find themselves playing catch-up for the first time in their lives (VMware came on site a couple of weeks ago to demo the latest beta of soft PCoIP and while I'm not able to offer any comparison with HDX, it certainly appeared to be a viable technology). 

Faced with this pressure we have to expect some sort of response from Citrix and it's looking increasing likely that this response might be to make HDX available outside XenApp and XenDesktop. I looked at why Citrix might consider licensing HDX to other WAN Optimization Controller vendors in a previous post, this time let's look at why Citrix might consider other options for HDX as a stand alone display protocol.  

Citrix have an number of interesting options here, ranging from full open source release (not going to happen!) through to offering it for sale as a stand-alone product (possible, but not at the top of my list). Brian Madden made the point for Citrix releasing HDX as a no cost/low cost stand alone display protocol and while I agree that this is attractive I'm just not convinced that Citrix would be willing to take this large a step yet. What might be more likely is to consider licensing HDX to players in the emerging Cloud Computing DaaS market. DaaS service providers are acutely aware that there are few visible differentiators between offerings, with the inevitable latency present in Cloud Computing offering HDX could be a deciding factor in choosing between one DaaS provider over another. 

If Gartner are to be believed hosted VDI will account for $65 B by 2013. Citrix are smart enough to know that there is no way that XenDesktop will win all that business, but there's a real possibility that if they license HDX,  Citrix will tap into a much larger part of the market and create a  substantial new revenue stream for very little effort. I know that some people will say that Citrix would never license HDX, but if I remember correctly this wouldn't be the first time. I seem to recall that back in the early days of WinFrame Citrix licensed ICA for use in a version of PC Anywhere. So while I can't make any predictions about who Citrix might license HDX to, the prospect of a DaaS provider delivering DeskTone (or whatever) over HDX is, I think, within the bounds of possibility.  

Can we possibly expect Citrix to repeat their Project Independence desktop hypervisor announcement strategy and break this news next week to coincide with VMworld. 

CA rescue Cassatt

In the turmoil of changing jobs I missed this announcement from CA.

While it's not exactly new news it's still worth drawing attention to CA coming to Cassatt's rescue and in so doing hopefully ensuring that Bill Coleman's vision for enterprise data center automation services will be realized.

CA will be integrating Cassatt's Active Response system into CA's own automation software Spectrum Automation Manager.  This should give CA a significant boost into the cloud services space both public and private.

Donald Ferguson, CA’s Chief Architect had this to say “Cassatt invented an elegant and innovative architecture and algorithms for data center performance optimization. Incorporating Cassatt’s analysis and optimization capabilities into CA’s world-class business-driven automation solution will enable cloud-style computing to reliably drive efficiencies in both on-premises, private data centers and off-premises, utility data centers. We believe the result will be a uniquely comprehensive infrastructure management approach, spanning monitoring, analysis, planning, optimization and execution.”

No news on the likelyhood of CA continuing to work on developing the XenApp plugin for Active Response, but if I hear more I'll let you know.

XenApp as SaaS? - III The ability to react to unanticipated demand

Unanticipated demand is one of IT’s nastier problems.  We don’t like it when we hear that we are going to have to deploy 100 more servers in 3 months to support growth of an existing system to support a new business initiative, but when 3 months becomes 24 hrs, miracles are required.  

Regardless of cause, the business expectation is always that somehow IT will deliver service.  Those of us working in the application delivery space are often better equipped than most to react to this type of change, we only need to bring two things to the table and we can deliver extra capacity in a matter of hours.  We always have server capacity available, either in the form of DR capacity, hot spares for high availability, over-capacity because we choose not to run servers at the red line, or our engineering and pre-production systems. Some servers may have to be reimaged, moved to a different farm, some applications deployed, but that is about it. Delivering server capacity ahead of demand even in these most difficult situations is exciting, but usually no more than that.

The trouble is where to you get the s/w licenses from? When it’s 5 o’clock on Friday afternoon, how are you going to place an order for new licenses in your procurement system, get the order approved, submitted to the vendor, processed and released so the license key is in your hands and deployed onto your systems by Monday morning? You can’t. Not unless you have a Service Provider License Agreement, and you can only get one of those if you are a real service provider, calling yourself an internal service provider delivering service to your own business isn’t going to work.  Something else is needed.  

There are several models that could be adopted to address the problem of unanticipated demand; the implementation of a SaaS model for product licensing being only one of them. If instead of having to deploy your own internal license delivery infrastructure, why couldn’t you connect to a (cloud hosted) service managed by your product vendor that managed and monitored license delivery and billed you either as a monthly service or as a perpetual license?  Whatever, the detail of the implemementation may not matter that much, the capability is what matters. So with that in mind I’d like to ask for comments on the topic and I'll create a simple poll in the right margin to gauge interest.

One of the more interesting thing about such a proposal is that it might enable customers to reduce the excess licensing capacity they have to carry, resulting in a significant capital saving, this could be especially advantageous during initial stages of a long roll-out.

I’ve been talking to Citrix about the need to provide solutions to problems around unanticipated demand for some time and while some interest has been expressed, there has been no visible action yet. Maybe if Citrix are making a commitment to offer service providers a better licensing mechanism, we won't be far behind.

Moving XenApp into the cloud - is Amazon growing a second Long Tail

Chris Fleck (Citrix VP of Solutions Development) recently published a short guide showing how to build XenApp Servers in Amazon's EC2 cloud using a Community AMI (Amazon Machine Image) that allows anyone to be up and running with their own XenApp server in minutes. In releasing XenApp to the cloud Chris has given every IT professional in the world access to their own personal XenApp lab and by extension has given every potential XenApp customer or Citrix Ready Partner a very low cost, risk free means of assessing how their applications could be delivered by XenApp (not a bad day's work Chris). 

Of course, this opportunity isn’t limited to Citrix, I would expect Ericom and all the other Remote Desktop Services vendors to follow Citrix’s lead and provide access to their products this way. If nothing else this will enable potential customers to perform side-by-side comparisons between competing technologies far more readily than is possible today. 

I wonder how long it will be before companies like Alpiron (see my previous posts on data center power management for more detail on Alpiron) release their own Community AMI to allow potential customers to evaluate Alpiron’s server power management system running in EC2. Granted there's nothing to stop Alpiron from doing this today with their own servers but it makes a lot of sense for a company selling power management solutions to be able to bolster their Green credentials by placing their demo environment in one of the most power efficient data centers in the world. 

Extending this line of thought a little further, what else looks like a good candidate for the cloud. At this point, I’m willing to suggest that almost anything without an SLA could be placed in the cloud. I still hesitate to suggest considering production environments. Cloud technologies are still immature and as such subject to greater threat from unidentified risk than more mature technologies would be; this alone is enough for me to want to steer clear of suggesting that production systems are good candidates for the cloud. 

One of the more interesting possibilities that application delivery from the cloud brings is in the realm of business continuity services.  About 10 years ago I spent a year or so working for a systems integrator that worked primarily with small businesses.  Most of these companies’ disaster recovery plans were limited to off-site storage of their backup tapes and an understanding that they might need to purchase replacement servers in the event anything untoward happened and hope that the backup tapes had worked. Skip forwards to the day after tomorrow, and that same company could have a cloud based DR plan that required them to mirror their data to the cloud every night, and in the event that disaster were to strike their recovery action would be to launch however many private AMIs (copies of their physical IT infrastructure) and they could have their entire IT infrastructure back up and running in the cloud in a couple of minutes.  This kind of warm standby service has always been beyond the reach of all but the largest IT shops, but with the advent of cloud services just as eveyone can afford their own lab environment, now every business can afford warm standby.

Which got me to thinking; Amazon has always been about the Long Tail, making most of their money by selling the products that bricks and mortar stores can’t afford the shelf space to stock.  It’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that with EC2 Amazon is growing a second tail, providing a low cost framework for DR and Business Continuity services at a price that traditional DR service providers can’t afford to match. 

Moving XenApp into the cloud - I

Last month Chris Fleck (Citrix VP of Solutions Development) showed me a project he was working on exploring the practicalities of building XenApp Servers in Amazon's EC2 cloud. Now that Chris has let the cat out of the bag and published on his blog, I can share a little more about what this might come to mean. 

Cloud computing is still a little too, well cloudy, for my liking, and I know I'm not alone in this opinion - Chris is running a highly unscientific poll on his blog that so far suggests that a full 32% of people 'don't trust the cloud for anything'. But while I consider myself to be paid up member of Skeptics Anonymous, I wouldn't come down quite that hard on some of the cloud based initiatives that come my way. There are some things you can do in the cloud today just as, if not more, efficiently than you can in the real world. A case in point - I'm one of those people who has to have my own server farm to allow me to explore ideas, do proof of concept work, avoid cleaning the yard etc. Last summer l decided that I wasn't going to continue suffer the utility bills any more so I moved my personal lab out of my office and into the cloud. I now have a complete lab environment hosted by AcXess complete with Active Directory Domain Controller, SQL and IIS servers, and both Windows Vista and XP workstations.  My utility bill is lower, my house is cooler and I can work in my office without the continual white noise scream of the server fans. There are still a couple of occasions where I would benefit from access to physical servers, but I'm prepared to let that slide when I compare the few shortcomings with the benefits that this model provides.

AcXess is a text book cloud service provider; multi-tenanted, subscription based, Internet delivered, service-centric, virtualized resources (Citrix XenServer in this case, but I don't really need to know this to use the service), they have ticks is all the right boxes. The AcXess service I use is MyCitrixLab.com; MyCitrixLab was originally put together for Citrix as a hosting platform for its Citrix Ready certification program, but it's the ideal service for anyone who is either too busy or too lazy to want to get involved in the day to day care and feeding of a full lab environment.  It's a fully managed service that takes just a couple of mouse clicks and a minute or so of waiting to get a lab environment delivered for your exclusive use. 

For the moment at least, the service that AcXess provide stands head and shoulders above Chris's XenApp in EC2 demonstrator, but there's been a few times in this past month where I've only needed a single server XenApp environment for a quick test and I've reached out towards Amazon for this. I have to say at this point I like the AcXess offering more than Amazon's, aside from the obvious added value a full managed service provides, and the difference between a full lab and a single server, the responsiveness of AcXess's servers has been significantly  better than Amazon's servers. Both connections are via ICA and although Amazon's servers are a littler further away than AcXess's I would have expected to have seen almost identical performance. Still you get what you pay for and at 12.5 cents per hour a XenApp server in EC2 is a hell of a good deal.

It's pretty clear that XenApp in the cloud is here to stay, I'm already taking advantage of it for some of my work and I'm sure others will follow. Where it starts to get interesting is when it moves beyond the lab stage.  If AcXess are running full XenApp farms in their cloud, how long will it take before Chris is demonstrating an entire XenApp farm inside EC2.