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View video - why you should attend the 2009 Study Tour
“Cloud computing has taken the world by storm” has become a cliché, but it is true. Mainstream magazines including The Economist and Business Week have already run major features on cloud computing, and even business executives are asking what it can do for them. No discussion of the future of an enterprise IT department can ignore cloud computing and where it might be used to the firm’s advantage.
The 2009 LEF Study Tour follows on from last year’s exploration of the feasibility of cloud computing, when delegates formulated the four-layer model shown below. This has served us well throughout the year as a definition and a basis for thinking about the best way to utilise the cloud.
This year’s tour takes the discussion to the next level, focusing on the business opportunities for cost savings, agility and collaboration, and investigating what is involved in deploying cloud computing in individual organisations. What type of cloud is appropriate for a particular activity? What level of service will deliver the best results? What are the trade-offs between freedom from worry about details, and freedom to choose exactly how an application runs?
We will discuss everything from the definition of cloud computing – still a problem for many people – to the benefits it brings and what it will cost. We will look at using the public cloud for selected purposes (such as development and testing, research projects and ad hoc trials of applications) as well as its advantages as a platform for collaborating beyond the firewall. We will explore the issues and advantages of deploying a private cloud. We will also look at the possibility of creating a hybrid cloud – maximising data centre efficiency by using the cloud to handle peak loads.
The objective of this tour is to make sure that delegates understand the issues associated with the different kinds of cloud. Questions the study tour will help to answer include:
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Which of the four layers in the cloud should your organisation use?
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What kind of orchestration do you need to meet the need for monitoring, deployment, security, identity and scaling?
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What is different about the security of applications that run in the cloud?
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Given the pace of change, increasing competition and the cost of in-house servers, can anyone afford to ignore the cloud?
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Did McKinsey get it wrong when it said the public cloud is more expensive than running applications in-house?
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What are the real costs of using the cloud?
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What about a private cloud, hosted in-house, safely behind the firewall? Under what circumstances would this approach make sense?
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When upgrading my data centre, should I go for powerful and reliable servers, or multiple, cheap, stripped-down cards in a new warehouse data centre?
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What are the organisational change implications when moving to the cloud?
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In response to feedback from participants in last year’s study tour, we have asked the vendor companies we visit to pay particular attention to their users’ experiences. As a result, you will be hearing from many organisations that are already active in the cloud, who will be sharing their own experiences and presenting their own stories.
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This year’s tour will take place in Santa Barbara, San Francisco and Silicon Valley, from 18 to 23 October 2009. Please contact Jane Kingston at jkingsto@csc.com, or complete and return the registration form, if you are interested in joining us.
Saturday 17 October
Sunday 18 October
Join us for a short tour of some of the fascinating sights of Santa Barbara, followed by lunch at a winery.
In the evening, Eli Lilly will share with us its experience of using the cloud to radically reduce the time needed to analyse potential drug components.
Following this presentation, there will be a drinks reception and informal buffet dinner – your chance to talk to other delegates and exchange views on this year’s theme.
Monday 19 October
Eucalyptus Systems
www.eucalyptus.com
Eucalyptus Systems develops enterprise-grade technology solutions built on the open-source Eucalyptus software for private and hybrid cloud computing. Originally developed as part of an academic research project by Dr Rich Wolski and his team in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara (www.ucsb.edu), Eucalyptus technology combines the cost efficiencies and scalability of cloud architecture with the security and control of a service on your own IT infrastructure.
Dr Wolski, who is the CTO of Eucalyptus Systems, will discuss with us the team’s experiences in developing the system, and particularly his vision of how hybrid clouds will be used in the future. In addition to developing and supporting the open-source Eucalyptus, he expects to see commercial offerings of Eucalyptus that support internal infrastructure systems and external public cloud environments.
RightScale
www.rightscale.com
The RightScale Cloud Management Platform helps you design, deploy and manage business-critical applications on the cloud – from scalable websites to complex grid deployments across multiple clouds.
Because RightScale operates across multiple clouds, it offers a way to control and coordinate instances running on, for example, EC2 at Amazon and Mosso at Rackspace. This is one approach to addressing an IT director’s concern about being dependent upon a single cloud provider.
There will also be the opportunity to discuss RightScale’s platform with an existing user.
Transfer to San Francisco
Tuesday 20 October
Bechtel
www.bechtel.com
Perhaps the world’s largest privately owned construction company, Bechtel is 111 years old. Headquartered in San Francisco, the company has managed projects in 140 countries.
Since IT appeared on the scene about 50 years ago, Bechtel has taken the lead in deploying new technology to address its business as well as its engineering, construction and project management challenges. It is no surprise then that Bechtel, under the leadership of CIO Geir Ramleth, has reached out to cloud computing to address some of today’s problems.
Geir is doing much of what many of us would like to do. He has surveyed the best of breed in data centre implementation and operation, in application hosting and in overall IT architecture, including the new consumer-facing giants, such as Google, and then selected the subset of practices and capabilities that best meets Bechtel’s requirements. He has replaced multiple scattered data centres with three large – rigidly standardized – centres in Europe, the United States and Asia. He has implemented the Project Service Network, Bechtel’s cloud computing architecture, to provide IT services to more than 30,000 users including sub-contractors and business partners.
We will have the opportunity to discuss with Geir the challenges which had to be met to deploy his strategy. How did he persuade his IT community to aggressively embrace change? How did he fund the project without going to the board for more money? How did he decide which software and hardware to deploy in Bechtel’s consolidated data centres?
Geir can address a great many of the questions we all have about how to move forward emphatically with the deployment of cloud computing while protecting an ongoing enterprise.
Appirio
www.appirio.com
Appirio offers both products and professional services that help enterprises accelerate their adoption of the cloud. With over 2,500 customers including Japan Post Network Ltd, Pfizer and Qualcomm, Appirio has a proven track record of implementing solutions and developing innovative products on cloud platforms such as Salesforce.com, Google Apps and Amazon Web Services.
Appirio was founded in 2006 and is proud to have won several significant industry accolades. The company is a partner of both Salesforce.com and Google, and is backed by leading investment firms, Sequoia Capital and GGV Capital.
We will also hear from one of Appirio’s customers.
VMware
www.vmware.com
VMware is one of the most important players in the virtualisation market and is pushing hard for leadership in the technologies necessary to implement cloud computing. Since our visit last year it has introduced VMware vSphere™ 4, described as a cloud operating system, which enables the implementation of private clouds now, with support for hybrid clouds coming later. The aim of vSphere 4 is to allow the management of large pools of infrastructure – processors, storage and networking – as a seamless, flexible and dynamic operating environment. The plan is to support dynamic federation between internal and external clouds, enabling private cloud environments that span multiple data centres and multiple cloud providers.
VMware will invite one of its customers to share its experiences with tour delegates.
Wednesday 21 October
Leading Edge Forum
lef.csc.com
Study Tour Director and Research Fellow Doug Neal will discuss LEF’s latest research into the cloud.
Amazon
aws.amazon.com
Amazon may not have invented cloud computing, but it has certainly brought it to the attention of hordes of enterprise IT executives who might otherwise have passed the idea by. Amazon has been steadily improving its cloud computing offerings, with three significant new additions:
- CloudWatch is a web service that provides monitoring for AWS cloud resources down to the level of CPU utilisation, disc reads and writes, and network traffic on selected EC2 instances.
- Auto Scaling allows dynamic management of your Amazon EC2 capacity so that you can ensure that the number of Amazon EC2 instances you are using scales up seamlessly during demand spikes, and scales down during demand lulls, to minimise costs.
- Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances. It can also detect problems with compute instances within a pool, and reroute traffic to healthy instances until the problems have been resolved.
On our previous visits with Amazon, executives have impressed us with their willingness to listen to the concerns and requirements of enterprise decision-makers. The steady stream of additional functionality shows this is still so.
Canonical
www.canonical.com
Canonical Limited is a UK-headquartered company essentially owned by South African Mark Shuttleworth, of both Ubuntu and space flight fame. The company was created to provide commercial support for the open source Ubuntu software platform. Particularly interesting in the latest version of Ubuntu is the inclusion of code from the Eucalyptus project (see above), which enables the creation of a private cloud with Amazon EC2 compatibility.
The latest release of Canonical’s Landscape systems management and monitoring service makes it possible to manage multiple Ubuntu instances on Amazon EC2 by choosing Ubuntu images on Amazon EC2 – pre-configured by Canonical with a Landscape client. Users can start a service on EC2 through Landscape.
We will hear from Simon Wardley, the Software Services Manager at Canonical. He is an entertaining and informative speaker on issues related to cloud computing, such as the commoditisation of IT and utility computing.
CohesiveFT
www.cohesiveft.com
CohesiveFT, headquartered in Chicago, focuses on automated software assembly, particularly in cloud computing environments. Its Elastic Server® platform is a web-based ‘factory’ for assembling, testing and deploying customised servers to a cloud.
The VPN-Cubed™ solution provides an overlay network that makes it possible to control addressing, topology, protocols and encrypted communications in third party environments. With VPN-Cubed, you can effectively bring parts of the cloud inside your existing security perimeter and switch between them on demand. This has the potential to address many of the issues around the security and reliability of the cloud.
Workshop
At this point in the tour, we will take the opportunity to spend some time discussing what we have heard from participants so far, and what we feel the implications are for us. Be prepared to share what you have learned. There is huge value in hearing what others have picked up or are troubled by.
Time to relax, reflect and recuperate
Drinks Reception and Dinner
Thursday 22 October
Microsoft
www.microsoft.com
Microsoft’s solution for the cloud computing marketplace is the Azure Services Platform, which was announced immediately after last year’s study tour. We will get an update on the status of this development, hosting and management environment, which is designed to allow anything that currently runs on a Windows Server at your own premises to run in a Microsoft data centre instead.
We will also hear about Live Framework, which is intended to help users build and deploy applications that synchronise across multiple devices in the cloud.
Google
www.google.com
A lot has happened at Google since we were there last October. Of particular interest is the fact that Java is now supported as a development language for Google Apps. Google Apps is no longer free and we see new, and perhaps very important, partnerships between Google and IBM, and Google and Salesforce.com (see below).
Google has been one of the pioneers of ‘the new data centre’ where the computing platform is a warehouse full of computers. The computers themselves are slimmed down servers, lacking in unnecessary video and communications ports, and perhaps carrying their own battery back up. The objective is to industrialise the data centre, to maximise the return on every square foot of space, kilowatt of power and joule of cooling. Not all of us will soon be planning a billion dollar data centre investment, but some of the lessons from Google could, if implemented in our existing data centres, result in a rapid return on the investment.
Friday 23 October
Salesforce.com
www.salesforce.com
Salesforce.com was created as a Software-as-a-Service vendor. With its Force.com Platform-as-a-Service offering, it became a cloud computing vendor well before it was fashionable. Now, partnering with Google, Salesforce.com has produced the Force.com for Google App Engine, which enables the creation of web and business applications that span both its own and Google’s cloud computing platforms, taking advantage of the key features of both. This makes it easier to build a consumer-oriented web application on Google App Engine that can leverage enterprise data and execute sophisticated logic residing in Force.com.
We will also hear a case study from a Salesforce.com customer.
Cisco
www.cisco.com
Cisco has suddenly jumped from being a provider of network technology for the data centre to being a major across-the-board provider of data centre infrastructure and services. In March, Cisco introduced its Unified Computing System (UCS), described as a ‘next-generation data centre platform’. Cisco is looking to offer a data centre architecture that dramatically reduces the number of devices that must be purchased, cabled, configured, powered, cooled and secured.
Cisco is serious about pursuing the enterprise data centre market, and one path to that is to provide solutions aimed at supporting cloud computing. At an early stage, it made a significant investment in VMware. This was followed by the introduction of the Nexus 7000 family of high capacity switches, and more recently, the launch of a family of servers, and the announcement that Cisco is intent on building a business as a data centre equipment provider.
Workshop
The tour will conclude with an intensive discussion among the delegates of what has been learned and what actions they expect to take. Real-time notes will be taken of delegate comments. These are extremely useful in assembling trip reports upon your return. Following such a workshop at the end of previous study tours, delegates reported that this session put the whole week into context, and highlighted the issues that still needed research.
Transport to San Francisco Airport will be provided for delegates flying out on Friday evening. Arrival time at the airport will be approximately 3pm.