Not everything is a crisis

One of the best lessons that was bestowed on me came somewhat early in my IT career — 1998.  In that job, the second of my then four-year career, was an associate director of IT responsible for managing the organization’s network, servers, and data center.  The email system was one of two systems that was not under my purview and had been traditionally supported by a different team in IT.
Each morning, the full IT staff, which consisted of 22 or so people, had what the IT Director called a “standing meeting”, a name that was quite literal.  The staff gathered in the department’s common area and we stood and listened while each staff person provided an overview of the previous day’s activities as well as what was on the docket for the coming day.  It was a very effective cross-function communications mechanism that served, in some ways, as a pseudo change management function witin the IT department.

As IT pros, we take our jobs pretty seriously and when there are problems, we want to get things fixed as quickly as possible.  During one such standing meeting, the email administrator started the conversation by informing the IT staff that the email system was down.  “We have a crisis this morning,” she stated.  “The email system is down.”

The IT Director calmly responded by asking, “Who died?”  The email administrator was a bit taken aback by the question and responded with, “Well… no one.”  The Director, again, very calmly, said “Then it’s not a crisis.  No one is dead and a few people are inconvenienced.”  Sure, for some IT departments – such as those in healthcare –death is a real consequence.  However, in higher education, that is rarely the case.

The lessons that IT Director imparted were very clear:

• Don’t overstate an issue, even if you’re well-meaning.  Doing so can impact long-term credibility.  Remember the “boy who cried wolf.”
• Maintain a perspective that is abstracted from the problem in order to be able to best address the problem.

Allow people to branch out

I started my IT career in February of 1994 and don’t think that I could have possibly worked in a better environment.  I came into the organization at a time when IT was just beginning to explode and the sky was the limit. The first Ethernet networks were being installed; the Internet was just coming into its own; Novell NetWare ruled the world.  At the same time, legacy systems were still very much in play and I spent much of my time creating and supporting database applications written in a 4GL called CQCS and that ran on a Data General MV/30000 minicomputer.  In addition, I was responsible for NetWare servers, a few early Windows NT systems, building out networks across three school districts, learning TCP/IP on the fly, user support, and much, much more.
In this position, I gained exposure to all areas of IT and had to learn each one as I went.  The people I worked for supported me greatly in this and allowed me to branch out and try pretty much anything I wanted.  It was here that I learned that I loved putting all of the pieces together and made a decision to eventually pursue IT management.

I consistently point to the opportunities that were presented to me in that very first IT job as the ones that were foundational to where I went in the IT world.

The lessons:

• Give people a chance!
• Break the comfort zone sometimes.

Make a decision

Unfortunately, it’s possible to learn just as much – if not more – from bad bosses.  The previous two stories were from early in my IT career and I worked for really good people.  This next tip comes courtesy of someone I worked for much more recently proving that there are always lessons to be learned no matter how long you’re alive.

In essence, the lesson I learned is that executive leadership needs to be capable of and willing to make decisions for the organization, including setting direction, resolving personality clashes or other conflicts when necessary.  It’s entirely possible that an executive might make the wrong decision, but I’ve seen firsthand what happens to an organization that is under the purview of someone that can’t get out of his own way, let alone inspire others.  CEOs that can’t make decisions leave their organizations stranded, their people confused, and the organization loses its way.

The lesson:

• Do SOMETHING.  Obviously, an informed decision is best, but simply standing still for too losng leads to nothing good.
• Be consistent.  Once you make a decision, stick with it unless it’s clearly wrong at some point.  Don’t pull back just because you get nervous

Ok, not the greatest analogy but still a great infographic:

Infographic by Forbes.com; Data by Wikibon.

Nice work by Forbes. Check out the original report, which includes in-depth analysis of market drivers, at wikibon.org/bigdata. And check out Wikibon’s own collection of infographics, covering Big Data and other topics, here.

Here are some of the highlights (all times and guests subject to change). Watch live on SiliconAngle.com. Send questions of Twitter using #theCUBE or directly to @furrier @dvellante @stu @jeffreyfkelly

A big thank you to sponsors EMC, Brocade, ServiceMesh and VCE.

Monday

EMC’s new CIO Vic Bhagat

EMC GM of Flash Zahid Hussain

EMC SVP of Global Services Tom Roloff

Spotlight on EMC’s Global Partner Summit

New Brocade CEO Lloyd Carney

Spotlight on Cloud Management

Spotlight on Data Center Transformation

Tuesday

Top Interop speaker and Networking Expert Ivan Pepelnjak

New EMC CTO John Roese

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger (11:35am Pacific)

Spotlight on Convergence for SMB

Spotlight on Storage for Mission Critical Applications

Spotlight on Software-defined Storage

Spotlight on Scale-out Solutions

EMC President of Advanced Storage Division Amitabh Srivastava

Wednesday

EMC President of Enterprise Storage Division Brian Gallagher

EMC President of Backup Recovery Systems Guy Churchward

EMC President of Unified Storage Division Rich Napolitano

EMC EVP of Product Operations & Marketing Jeremy Burton (noon Pacific)

Pivotal CEO Paul Maritz (12:30pm Pacific)

EMC President & COO David Goulden (2pm Pacific)

Spotlight on Simplifying Converged Infrastructure

Spotlight on Data Protection-as-a-Service including an interview with FedEx

The embedded video below is a Breaking Analysis discussing EMC’s recent earnings, high growth opportunities and a preview of EMC World.

Since then, IBM has largely had the Industrial Internet, as the concept of has come to be called, to itself. The company’s Smarter Planet division has played a key role in making IBM the biggest Big Data company on the planet and was a lone bright spot in IBM’s otherwise disappointing Q1 2013 results.

But IBM now has some serious competition to consider in the form of General Electric. GE, the worlds largest maker of industrial equipment, announced a $105 million investment in Pivotal, the new Big Data company formed by EMC and VMware. The investment gives GE a 10% stake in the new company and the two (GE and Pivotal) will collaborate to develop and deliver analytics software and services to GE’s industrial equipment customers.

The investment and collaboration gives GE access to the IP and technologies it will need to realize its vision “to develop a new generation of intelligent systems that can predict and respond to changes,” as GE’s Bill Ruh put it in 2011 upon the launch of a new global software center focused on Big Data and analytics. Said Ruh:

“These digital offerings will harness and automatically analyze the petabytes of data that are generated by industrial equipment to help our customers get the most value from their assets. All of this activity will occur on the ‘Industrial Internet,’ a living network of intelligent machines and systems.”

The market opportunity presented by this new world of interconnected, intelligent devices is enormous for both industrial equipment manufacturers and Big Data technology companies. By joining forces with Pivotal (and by extension EMC and VMware), GE just became both. While it will take some time for GE to build out a comprehensive portfolio of analytics software offerings across its varied lines of business (medical, aircraft, consumer appliances, etc.), the company is well positioned to take on IBM in the competition to win the Industrial Internet.

It’s also important to remember that the opportunity presented by the Industrial Internet is not limited to increasing IBM and GE’s market valuations. Billions of people, particularly in the developed world, are struggling with limited access to clean drinking water, rising air and noise pollution, crumbling infrastructure and myriad other challenges. With the global population forecast to top 8 billion by 2025, these pressures are only going to increase. Harnessing data to address these challenges and improve the lives of real people is the other major opportunity of the Industrial Internet.

Recently, IBM announced a $1 billion initiative intended to improve the overall flash storage market and integrate flash storage in the company’s line of enterprise technology equipment, including servers, storage, and other products.  The company feels that flash-based storage is an a tipping point in the marketplace and is poised to become much more widely used, thanks to the incredible performance gains offered by the technology.  Further, as is the case with any technology, as it approaches a critical mass point, the overall costs of the technology begin to drop and this is certainly happening with flash storage.  There are also other significant cost benefits to flash-based storage, such as reduced power consumption.  At scale, such power savings can be real and significant.

The changing face of technology

The rise of flash storage has coincided with the rise of big data analytics, hyperscale computing, massive databases, and other I/O intensive workloads.  In fact, I see some workloads as inextricably linked to the kind of storage upon which they run.  For example, a major analytics application is heavily reliant on the underlying flash storage that powers it.  Rather than storage simply being the repository in which data is housed, for certain applications, the storage technology has become an integral part of the overall application and, without it, the application can’t function.

Introducing IBM FlashSystem

As a part of the announcement, IBM also gave airtime to the company’s new IBM FlashSystem products.  The product models, the FlashSystem 710, 720, 810 & 820, each provide the customer with an all-flash solution, but in slightly different ways.  The 710 and the 810 each provide customers with the best possible performance by including single-level cell (SLC) flash storage.  The 710 provides 6.9 TB of raw (5 TB of usable) capacity while the 810 provides 16.5 TB of raw (12.4 TB usable) capacity.  The 720 and the 820 use enterprise grade multi-level cell (eMLC) flash storage which, while not providing quite the performance of SLC, provides greater capacity capability.  The 720 provides 10 TB of usable enterprise eMLC flash storage (13.6 TB raw capacity) while the 820 provides 20 TB of usable RAID 5 protected eMLC flash (24.7 TB usable RAID 0, 33.0 TB raw capacity) storage.  If you’re not sure about the differences between SLC, eMLC and MLC flash storage, read my flash storage primer here at Wikibon.  If I’m reading IBM’s list price sheet correctly, the 710 and 810 will run anywhere from around $52,000 to $165,000, depending on the type of drives that are chosen.  For the 720 and 820, list price runs anywhere from $190,000 to $350,000.  Bear in mind that these are list prices and many options are a la carte.

All of IBM’s new products carry with them major performance benefits, including variable stripe RAID, which enhances performance without sacrificing reliability, and latency figures measured in microseconds.  In addition, these system provide hundreds of thousands of IOPS worth of performance capacity, making them suitable for even the most demanding tasks.  IBM has joined the ranks of many all-flash plays on the market, but carries with it a brand that many people trust implicitly and that is backed by a vast array of products and services.

At present, I find no evidence that IBM provides built-in data reduction features, such as deduplication.  The FlashSystem lineup is geared at raw performance.

My thoughts

First of all, I applaud IBM for taking this bold step.  These significant efforts will almost certainly bring down the overall cost of flash storage for the masses, making the technology more accessible to those that need it or are beginning to need it.  This includes even SMBs and midmarket firms, which are discovering the need for solutions that include flash storage in order to ensure that workloads perform as desired.

I agree that there are market verticals and projects — trading, big data, hyperscale, large VDI environments – that can gain significant benefits from all-flash systems.  In such environments, low latency figures are in high demand and there a big I/O needs.  System such as IBM’s FlashSystem lineup fit these low latency, high IOPS situations very well and can provide performance levels not possible with other solutions.

As a part of the company’s announced, IBM indicated that many customers actually pay more for their rotational storage than they would for an all-flash system.  This is due to some of the techniques that people use – such as short stroking – to gain as much performance as possible out of rotational disk system.  This is a storage practice in which data is written only to the outermost rings of a disk, thereby minimizing the distance that read and write heads have to travel.  While this can yield performance gains, those gains come at the cost of capacity as customers simply don’t use a good chunk of their storage.

For mainstream CIOs running typical mainstream workloads, though, I still believe that it’s too early to take an all-flash approach.  Although the economics are getting better, the fact remains that the dollar per gigabyte figure is far higher in an all-flash environment than it is in a rotating disk environment, particularly since many organizations aren’t using things like short-stroking.  I remain convinced that the near-term opportunity for all-flash storage still remains in outlier territory when compared against mainstream needs and that, for affordable performance gains, CIOs should consider hybrid storage players that provide very good performance at very good prices.  Obviously, for CIOs in extremely I/O intensive industries, the flash market is getting more competitive every day and all-flash solutions are becoming reachable to more organizations as prices continue to drop.  I believe that we are still a few years away from seeing significant mainstream adoption of all-flash arrays, particularly as hybrid devices gain more and more features and performance.  That said, and as I mentioned, I believe IBM’s foray into all-flash provides significant validation for this space in the long term and that IBM will bring to the market engineering breakthroughs and eventual cost reductions that will accelerate the pace of a switch from hard disks to all flash.

I’d like to explore the topic of how system and storage architectures are changing and the impact this will have on application delivery and organizational productivity.

Allow me to put forth the following premise:

Today’s enterprise IT infrastructure limits application value.

What does that mean? To answer this, let’s first explore the notion of value. The value IT brings to an organization flows directly from the application to the business and is measured in terms of the productivity of the organization. Infrastructure in-and-of itself delivers no direct value; however the applications, which run on infrastructure directly affect business value. Value comes in many forms but at the highest level it’s about increasing revenue and/or cutting costs; and ultimately delivering bottom line profits.

A Bit of History

In the very early days of computing, the delta between processor and disk speeds was negligible. Today it’s literally 6 orders of magnitude—counting nanoseconds (processor) and milliseconds (disk). At the dawn of computing time, all data was held on magnetic drums. These had a single head per track, and rotated at 17,500rpm. There were 25 sectors per track. By optimizing the placing of instructions and output data on the tracks, a maximum processor speed of 400KHz, and a practical speed 100KHz. Memory access was in line with processor speed. It took it 1 microsecond to process and 1 microsecond to write to persistent storage.

Today processor speeds are measured in GHz (>1,000 times faster), and the magnetic media write times in milliseconds (~1,000 times slower); a net increase in difference of 1 million times (10 to the minus 6). This difference has been offset by reading and writing large blocks, increasing the multi-programming levels of OS and file systems, increasing the number of cores, increasing the IP invested into the IO storage controllers and, most importantly of all, increasing the functionality and complexity of the database systems to protect data, primarily from Oracle, IBM and Microsoft.

The Processor IO Gap

Think about this for just a moment in terms of distance. It’s like processor speeds are 1 foot away whereas disk speeds are like the distance from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Applications are constrained by this length of time delay. The amount of data that can be brought into systems is extremely limited and application design must be cognizant of this slowness.

Today’s computing infrastructure can be likened to a military convoy. The entire convoy must decelerate to allow the slowest vehicles to keep up. The slowest vehicle in computer systems today is the mechanical disk drive.

Computer systems today are designed to minimize trips to LA. They’re designed to handle many other tasks while data is being written to disk. So there’s an immensely complicated multiprogramming environment that’s been built up over decades. The speed of applications is severely limited by this complexity and an organization’s ability to attack a new problem is constrained by the inflexibility of computer architectures.

In particular, databases are relatively small. And there are lots of them. Calls made to the database are relatively few. The transactional systems must be isolated from all the other data in an organization so their performance can be optimized. Think about an ERP system. It has many modules tracking inventory, supply chain, demand forecasts, etc. The entire workflow of the organization must be built around the application and workflow is a fixed process that is very hard to change. To alter pricing, for example, all these asynchronous systems must by synched up in a data warehouse that becomes the single source of record. But by the time the single source of record is in place the market may very well have changed.

How Does Flash Change Infrastructure Design?

For the past fifteen years, function has moved out of the processor into the array – for good reason – to share data, protect information and off load servers. With persistent flash, however, function is moving back, closer to the server—promising new levels of application performance and organizational flexibility. Flash will reside at the server, in all-flash arrays, in hybrid arrays – virtually throughout the entire stack. The control point for the flash, however, will be the fast server, not the slow storage array.

Efforts to address the disparity between processor and storage performance have been seen with in-memory databases, which have used DRAM protected by battery backup to provide persistent memory. This is a very expensive solution with costly databases, that may have trouble scaling.

We’ve also seen efforts to extend memory using flash and atomic writes. With atomic writes, the delta between cpu and disk speeds is reduced by 10,000 times, from a best of 1 milliseconds to 100 nanoseconds for a line write of 64 bytes. Because flash technology is silicon-based, it is not constrained by mechanical limitations. The gap in speed between the technologies should not increase again. This will lead to significant reduction in complexity in IO engineering, and an radical increase in the size, complexity and potential business value of applications.

As a result – application design will change. Organizations will begin to design a much flatter database structure allowing secure, multi-tenant access to the single database of record. Data architectures will accommodate transactional and analytic data and allow machines to make decisions (for example pricing changes) in near real time based on market conditions.  In this scenario, the organizational workflow can be flexibly changed in days or less; versus many months.

The impacts of these changes to organizational productivity will be enormous and result in much greater IT value and flexibility. Companies will be able to respond much quicker to market opportunities, competitive threats, disasters, etc…by analyzing and acting on massive streams of data in near real-time.

As data volumes explode and new approaches like Hadoop hit the enterprise, flash will play a critical role in allowing organizations to manage, capitalize on and monetize massive amounts information. System design will evolve and flash will be an enabler to this vision. Flash as a persistent medium is important, but much more critical and valuable will be the software that manages the data—end-to-end. Systems and software expertise – in file systems, operating systems, metadata management and middleware will be critical to enable a new crop of applications to be developed.

Importantly, spinning disk will not disappear. It will still account for the lion’s share of capacity stored and nearly half the spend. But increasingly organizations will invest more in the software, algorithms, data scientists and processes to extract value from the data rather than invest in the container in which the data resides.

Clearly this will not happen overnight. Flash systems that don’t disrupt existing processes will help accelerate existing applications without resorting to unnatural acts (e.g. wide striping, short stroking, etc). Such systems will be in high demand in the near-to-mid term.

However longer term, I believe the ideas shaping up in the world of hyperscale – where application design is being completely re-thought – will trickle into system design within the traditional enterprise and drive new levels of productivity and  unprecedented value from IT systems.

For a re-cap – check out this short video I did on this topic:

By more efficiently processing Big Data workloads, this future iteration of Moonshot, likely using 64-bit ARM processors, aims to reduce energy usage by power-hungry Hadoop clusters. Hadoop employs a scale-out approach, meaning as storage and compute requirements grow, you simply add more inexpensive, commodity boxes to the cluster. The reliance on cheap commodity boxes means clusters can grow quickly, particularly as Hadoop deployments graduate from back-room experiments to production-grade clusters supporting mission critical applications and business processes.

Such large clusters can go grow very hot very fast. So while the boxes themselves are cheap, power and cooling costs can quickly add up. Moonshot promises to lower both power and cooling costs by, again, optimizing Big Data workloads in a more energy-efficient way. According to HP, Moonshot reduce power consumption by up to 89% as compared to x86 servers.

Moonshot is just one component of HP’s Big Data portfolio. The company is among the largest providers of commodity hardware to power Big Data deployments along with technical services to configure and optimize installations. While representing a much smaller percentage of its overall revenue, HP also has Vertica and Autonomy in the fold. The company recently began doing a better job of packaging these software assets into consumable offerings in the form of AppSystem appliances.

HP also yesterday announced the formation of what it calls the Pathfinder Innovation Ecosystem. It consists of a couple dozen HP partners focused on developing software specific for Moonshot. Partners include Big Data vendors Hortonworks, Couchbase, MapR, Cloudera and DataStax, as well as Vertica and Autonomy. The Pathfinder initiative’s goal is to further integrate these technologies, both hardware and software, to make it easier for customers to leverage, for example, Vertica’s analytic prowess with Autonomy’s search and discovery capabilities on top of Moonshot, or to pair Moonshot servers with Hortonworks HDP or DataStax’s Cassandra .

Expect to see more from HP along these lines as part of its five year plan to remake itself into an enterprise technology and services company. Between its internal assets and partner ecosystem, HP has access to most of the Big Data assets required to be a legitimate competitor in the Big Data space. A lot will depend on execution.

Below is my Breaking Analysis on Project Moonshot on SiliconANGLE.tv recorded live this morning (April 8, 2013)

Facebook’s Zuckerberg described Home as a family of apps that keep Facebook content at the forefront of the mobile device experience.  This experience delves deeply into the operating system, too, replacing both the home and lock screens with a Facebook-developed Cover Screen.  The Cover Screen displays social information you’d find on the site and users can interact with that content without having to open a specific app.

Facebook also announced a feature that the company calls “Chat Heads.”  With this feature, users get Facebook’s IM/chat service on their mobile device.  Communications services are brought front and center to the user experience, hiding from the user underlying separate apps and simplifying things a bit.  Frankly, I see that as a laudable goal as there are just so many communications channels these days.

Although Facebook announced partnerships with mobile phone developer HTC to bake Home right into the phone (The HTC First), the service will be available from the Google Play store starting on April 12.  Because Home is an application and is not the base operating system, users will be able to upgrade to new versions of Home at-will, and will not be at the mercy of carriers, who often refuse to support newer versions of operating systems in their devices.

At present, only Android will get the full Facebook Home experience.  iOS and Windows Phone are not as open as Android, thus complicating Facebook’s efforts to hook as deeply into the operating system as they’d like.

My take

I’m really of two minds on this move.  First, for those that live their lives on Facebook, I can see the benefit in making Facebook the primary experience on a mobile device.  Those folks will now have an easier time doing… whatever it is people that spend hours at a time on Facebook do.

In a more general way, I see some potential for Android users as Facebook Home can bring some cross-vendor similarity to the device and package applications in a way that might make more sense for users.  If Home is a hit with the Facebook crowd, there also exists the potential that other outlets—Twitter, LinkedIn, FourSquare, etc.—can hook into the tool and leverage its direct access to the user.

On the opposite side of the argument, though, lies something a bit different.  Do we really need a Facebook “appliance” in our pockets?  I know that, for many people, the terms “Facebook” and “the Internet” are interchangeable, but I can’t imagine that this is a seriously high percentage of people.  Perhaps if other companies decide to leverage the Cover Screen and the Facebook “platform” on Android, it will become something more than “Facebook only” and might garner a wider adoption.

I believe that Facebook was smart to avoid the custom hardware and operating system game.  That field is getting tougher to crack and would have added YAE (Yet Another Ecosystem) to deal with.

For some time, people have been asking what Facebook will do in mobile.  This seems to be the company’s answer.  It was stated that, at present, the Cover Screen will not have ads, but it’s certainly prime real estate once (if) this service kicks into high gear.  If it’s a hit and there is a critical mass of people staring at the Cover Screen whenever they look at their phone, it’s not hard to envision the advertising potential that this space would have for Facebook and how easily that would translate into big dollars.  This would be further enhanced if other networks decide to leverage Facebook’s work in this space and push their own content.

As is the case with many things Facebook, the jury is out.  Once Facebook Home hits the market, Facebook-for-lifers will probably jump on it, but the Android-only nature of the tool will probably hurt it a bit.  If the company is able to reasonably execute on this platform, it could mean major ad revenue, particularly as partnerships with other content providers are put into place.

• On-premises – physical server.
• On-premises – virtual machine.
• Off-premises – hosted.
• Off-premises – cloud.

Over the past decade, the issue of whether to run on-premises workloads on physical hardware vs. virtual infrastructure has become pretty easy for organizations to assess, with the majority of new workloads being run inside virtual machines.  That said, there are still a good number of applications deployed on physical hardware.

When the deployment decision is down to just physical vs. virtual, CIOs and their technical staff can almost always make a quick determination as to where to run the workload.  Once off-premises options are thrown into the mix, however, the decision becomes a bit more complex.

When it comes to managing IT, SMBs and small midmarket firms have pretty unique challenges.  Even though they may run fewer systems, these firms must maintain IT portfolios that look much like the portfolios from their larger enterprise brethren.  Moreover, they have to do so with fewer people.  As such, IT staffers in these spaces often need to have a wider variety of skill sets, which may mean that they can’t get as deep into a particular area as would be possible with more people.  As a result, CIOs in SMBs tend to be creatures of caution and, if possible, like to forgo custom development efforts in favor of off-the-shelf solutions.

In another part of this article series, I outlined some of the services that organizations operate along with advice on what to move to the cloud and what to keep on-premises.  I think that the rules are a bit different for SMBs, for the reasons that I outlined above.  For these entities, focus on the business is critical, but it’s often overtaken by the need to constantly feed and care for the technology environment.  As such, smaller organizations can sometimes lose out on many of the business-facing benefits that can come from IT.

For SMBs, one of the first services that I believe should be moved to the cloud is email and calendaring.  Office 365 has proven to be a solid performer and provides just about all of the capabilities of the full on-premises Exchange but without some of the hassle that comes from having to manage the Exchange infrastructure.  Administrators can still use tools like PowerShell and a web console to manage Office 365 and Office 365 can be configured to use local Active Directory for authentication.  In that way, organizations retain control of the authentication and authorization component of the service.

This brings me to item number two for the SMB: Authentication.  Simple answer:  Keep it local.  It’s too important to push off anywhere else.

I could simply go down a list of services and make a recommendation, but instead, I’ll provide some general guidance for the SMB with regard to where to run services.  There are five questions that the CIO should ask to make a determination as to where to run services.

Question #1: Do I have the staff to run the service in-house?  As mentioned, SMB IT departments are often staffed by generalists rather than people with deep specializations in any one area.  This is not a knock on these departments; it’s simply reality.  If a CIO is bringing in a service that is going to require skills that are not present in the department, that CIO must decide whether to add the skills through training or new staff or, if the potential is there, ask if someone else (i.e. a cloud or hosting provider) can better support the service.

Question #2: Does the service require significant hands-on needs?  Some services simply require a lot of hands-on support.  This kind of effort can be expensive to outsource, so a CIO may make the decision that training or hiring makes the most sense in this situation.

Question #3: Would (or does) running the service in-house damage my ability to support the rest of the IT portfolio?  Any time something new is added to the portfolio, something has to change.  Either support for something else needs to decrease or resources need to be added to cover the new service.  If a new service is going to seriously disrupt your existing portfolio and you’re not able to hire staff to manage the new service, your best bet may be to push that service to an outside provider.

Question #4: Does this service require more HA or DR need that we currently have in-house?  A whole lot of SMBs don’t have backup systems that are as robust as they should be nor do they have critical items such as generators that can keep workloads running even when disaster strikes.  Those kinds of items can carry big price tags, so if a new service requires truly high levels of availability or recovery, an outside partner may be the best option.

Question #5: Can my current environment support the service to appropriate levels?  CIOs have spent years building out robust virtual environments, but that doesn’t mean that they’re ready for anything that’s thrown at them.  In some cases, the cost to add additional infrastructure simply isn’t worth the capital investment, so CIOs may make the choice to move to the outside.

Summary

SMBs can be unique animals in the IT space.  They can be exciting places to work, but carry significant challenges not always faced by their bigger brothers.  These differences often force CIOs to think a bit differently about how services might be deployed.

One company tackling the tools challenge of converged infrastructure is Zenoss. In an effort to educate the market on the benefits, challenges and opportunities of convergence, Zenoss did a survey of end-users. On Thursday, March 28, there is a live webinar with Zenoss VP of Engineering Alan Conley, Director of Product Marketing Jen Darrouzet and me. The full survey report and registration for the event can be found here. Below is an infographic with data from the survey.

As adoption ramps up, so does the competition from the big players and startups. Questions and input from the community are always welcome.

For more on converged infrastructure from Wikibon, see:

Converged Infrastructure Moves from Infant to Adolescent

VCE Delivers Vision to Simplify IT