Lasers by dmuth (cc) (from Flickr)

Read an article today on AAAS Science Now online magazine (See Hot Idea for a Faster Hard Drive) on using lasers alone to toggle magnetic moments in specially designed ferro-magnetic materials.

The disk industry has been experimenting with bit patterned media/shingled writes (see our post on Sequential Only Disk)  and thermally or heat assisted magnetic recording (TAR or HAMR) heads for some time now.  The TAR/HAMR heads use both magnetization and heat to quickly change magnetic moments in ferro-magnetic material (see our post on When will disks become extinct).

Laser’s can magnetize!!

The new study seems to be able to do away with the magnetic recording mechanism and is able to change the magnetic value with a short focused laser burst alone.   But what does this mean for the future of disk drives.

Well one thing the article highlights is that with the new technology disks can transfer data much faster than today.   Apparently magnetic recording takes a certain interval of time (1 nanosecond) per bit and getting below that threshold was previously unattainable.

That is until this new laser magnetization came along.  According to the article they can reliably change a bits magnetic value in 1/1000th of a nanosecond with heat alone.  This may enable disk data transfers a 100X faster than available today.

Seagate’s 600GB-15Krpm 15.7 Cheetah disk has an sustained data transfer rate of from 122 to 204 MB/sec (see their 15K.7 Cheetah drive data sheet).  A 100 times that we will need a much faster interface than 16Gb/s FC which probably only transfers data at ~1600 MB/sec burst which means these drives will need like 128Gb/s FC.  In addition to the data transfer speed up, with the laser pulse alone it is much more energy efficient than the HAMR heads which need both magnetics and laser.

How soon such advances will make their way into disk drives is another question.

Is today’s 15Krpm disk speed limit due to writing speeds?

I have been struck for some time now why 3.5″ disk drives never went faster than 15Krpm.  I had always surmised it was something to do with the material mechanics at the outer diameter that limited the rotational speed.

Then when drives were shrunk to 2.5″ I thought we would see some faster rotational speed, but it never happened.  Perhaps magnetic write speeds are the problem.   At the 204MB/sec we are reading bits in under a nanosecond but write sustained data transfer is another question.  Maybe there will be a 22Krpm disk in my future?

Fixed head disks déjà vu

Ok now that that’s settled we need to work on speeding up seek times.  I  could see some sort of a rotating diffraction grating or diffraction comb taking the laser and splitting it up into multiple beams to cover each track at almost the same time, sort of like a fixed head disk of old (see IBM 2305).  This would allow disks to write seek to any track in microseconds rather than milliseconds and write data in picoseconds rather than nanoseconds.

How to do something like this for reading data off a track is yet another question.  It’s too bad we couldn’t use the laser alone to read the magnetic information as well as write it.

If you could do that and use a similar diffraction grating/comb for reading data, one could conceivably create a cost effective, competitive solution to the performance of SSD technology.  And that would be very interesting device indeed!

Comments?

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Post tags: Disk data transfer speeds, Disk RPM, disk technology, Drive write head, fixed head disks, Laser magnetization, Seagate, Ultrafast magnetization

rayo 3 by El Garza (cc) (from Flickr)

Although technically Project Lightening and Thunder represent some interesting offshoots of EMC software, hardware and system prowess,  I wonder why they would decide to go after this particular market space.

There are plenty of alternative offerings in the PCIe NAND memory card space.  Moreover, the PCIe card caching functionality, while interesting is not that hard to replicate and such software capability is not a serious barrier of entry for HP, IBM, NetApp and many, many others.  And the margins cannot be that great.

So why get into this low margin business?

I can see a couple of reasons why EMC might want to do this.

• Believing in the commoditization of storage performance.  I have had this debate with a number of analysts over the years but there remain many out there that firmly believe that storage performance will become a commodity sooner, rather than later.  By entering the PCIe NAND card IO buffer space, EMC can create a beachhead in this movement that helps them build market awareness, higher manufacturing volumes, and support expertise.  As such, when the inevitable happens and high margins for enterprise storage start to deteriorate, EMC will be able to capitalize on this hard won, operational effectiveness.
• Moving up the IO stack.  From an applications IO request to the disk device that actually services it is a long journey with multiple places to make money.  Currently, EMC has a significant share of everything that happens after the fabric switch whether it is FC,  iSCSI, NFS or CIFS.  What they don’t have is a significant share in the switch infrastructure or anywhere on the other (host side) of that interface stack.  Yes they have Avamar, Networker, Documentum, and other software that help manage, secure and protect IO activity together with other significant investments in RSA and VMware.   But these represent adjacent market spaces rather than primary IO stack endeavors.  Lightening represents a hybrid software/hardware solution that moves EMC up the IO stack to inside the server.  As such, it represents yet another opportunity to profit from all the IO going on in the data center.
• Making big data more effective.  The fact that Hadoop doesn’t really need or use high end storage has not been lost to most storage vendors.  With Lightening, EMC has a storage enhancement offering that can readily improve  Hadoop cluster processing.  Something like Lightening’s caching software could easily be tailored to enhance HDFS file access mode and thus, speed up cluster processing.  If Hadoop and big data are to be the next big consumer of storage, then speeding cluster processing will certainly help and profiting by doing this only makes sense.
• Believing that SSDs will transform storage. To many of us the age of disks is waning.  SSDs, in some form or another, will be the underlying technology for the next age of storage.  The densities, performance and energy efficiency of current NAND based SSD technology are commendable but they will only get better over time.  The capabilities brought about by such technology will certainly transform the storage industry as we know it, if they haven’t already.  But where SSD technology actually emerges is still being played out in the market place.  Many believe that when industry transitions like this happen it’s best to be engaged everywhere change is likely to happen, hoping that at least some of them will succeed. Perhaps PCIe SSD cards may not take over all server IO activity but if it does, not being there or being late will certainly hurt a company’s chances to profit from it.

There may be more reasons I missed here but these seem to be the main ones.  Of the above, I think the last one, SSD rules the next transition is most important to EMC.

They have been successful in the past during other industry transitions.  If anything they have shown similar indications with their acquisitions by buying into transitions if they don’t own them, witness Data Domain, RSA, and VMware.  So I suspect the view in EMC is that doubling down on SSDs will enable them to ride out the next storm and be in a profitable place for the next change, whatever that might be.

And following lightening, Project Thunder

Similarly, Project Thunder seems to represent EMC doubling their bet yet again on the SSDs.  Just about every month I talk to another storage startup coming out in the market providing another new take on storage using every form of SSD imaginable.

However, Project Thunder as envisioned today is not storage, but rather some form of external shared memory.  I have heard this before, in the IBM mainframe space about 15-20 years ago.  At that time shared external memory was going to handle all mainframe IO processing and the only storage left was going to be bulk archive or migration storage – a big threat to the non-IBM mainframe storage vendors at the time.

One problem then was that the shared DRAM memory of the time was way more expensive than sophisticated disk storage and the price wasn’t coming down fast enough to counteract increased demand.  The other problem was making shared memory work with all the existing mainframe applications was not easy.  IBM at least had control over the OS, HW and most of the larger applications at the time.  Yet they still struggled to make it usable and effective, probably some lesson here for EMC.

Fast forward 20 years and NAND based SSDs are the right hardware technology to make  inexpensive shared memory happen.  In addition, the road map for NAND and other SSD technologies looks poised to continue the capacity increase and price reductions necessary to compete effectively with disk in the long run.

However, the challenges then and now seem as much to do with software that makes shared external memory universally effective as with the hardware technology to implement it.  Providing a new storage tier in Linux, Windows and/or VMware is easier said than done. Most recent successes have usually been offshoots of SCSI (iSCSI, FCoE, etc).  Nevertheless, if it was good for mainframes then, it certainly good for Linux, Windows and VMware today.

And that seems to be where Thunder is heading, I think.

Comments?

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Post tags: commoditization of storage performance, Commodity hardware, EMC, EMC Project Lightening, EMC Project Thunder, external shared memory, Linux, NAND, SSD, VMware, Windows

Isilon Packaging by ChrisDag (cc) (from Flickr)”]

[InfiniBand interconnected

From many analyst’s perspective, IB is one of the only technologies out there that can efficiently interconnect a cluster of commodity servers into a supercomputing system.

What’s InfiniBand?

Recall that IB is one of three reigning data center fabric technologies available today which include 10GbE, and 16 Gb/s FC.  IB is currently available in DDR, QDR and FDR modes of operation, that is 5Gb/s, 10Gb/s or 14Gb/s, respectively per single lane, according to the IB update (see IB trade association (IBTA) technology update).  Systems can aggregate multiple IB lanes in units of 4 or 12 paths (see wikipedia IB article), such that an IB QDRx4 supports 40Gb/s and a IB FDRx4 currently supports 56Gb/s.

The IBTA pitch cited above showed that IB is the most widely used interface for the top supercomputing systems and supports the most power efficient interconnect available (although how that’s calculated is not described).

Where else does IB make sense?

One thing IB has going for it is low latency through the use of RDMA or remote direct memory access.  That same report says that an SSD directly connected through a FC takes about ~45 μsec to do a read whereas the same SSD directly connected through IB using RDMA would only take ~26 μsec.

However, RDMA technology is now also coming out on 10GbE through RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE, pronounced “rocky”).  But ITBA claims that IB RDMA has a 0.6 μsec latency and the RoCE has a 1.3 μsec.  Although at these speed, 0.7 μsec doesn’t seem to be a big thing, it doubles the latency.

Nonetheless, Intel’s purchase is an interesting play.  I know that Intel is focusing on supporting an ExaFLOP HPC computing environment by 2018 (see their release).  But IB is already a pretty active technology in the HPC community already and doesn’t seem to need their support.

In addition, IB has been gradually making inroads into enterprise data centers via storage products like the Oracle Exadata Storage Server using the 40 Gb/s IB QDRx4 interconnects.  There are a number of other storage products out that use IB as well from EMC Isilon, SGI, Voltaire, and others.

Of course where IB can mostly be found today is in computer to computer interconnects and just about every server vendor out today, including Dell, HP, IBM, and Oracle support IB interconnects on at least some of their products.

Whose left standing?

With Qlogic out I guess this leaves Cisco (de-emphasized lately), Flextronix, Mellanox, and Intel as the only companies that supply IB switches. Mellanox, Intel (from Qlogic) and Voltaire supply the HCA (host channel adapter) cards which provide the server interface to the switched IB network.

Probably a logical choice for Intel to go after some of this technology just to keep it moving forward and if they want to be seriously involved in the network business.

IB use in Big Data?

On the other hand, it’s possible that Hadoop and other big data applications could conceivably make use of IB speeds and as these are mainly vast clusters of commodity systems it would be a logical choice.

There is some interesting research on the advantages of IB in HDFS (Hadoop) system environments (see Can high performance interconnects boost Hadoop distributed file system performance) out of Ohio State University.  This research essentially says that Hadoop HDFS can perform much better when you combine IB with IPoIB (IP over IB, see OpenFabrics Alliance article) and SSDs.  But SSDs alone do not provide as much benefit.   (Although my reading of the performance charts seems to indicate it’s not that much better than 10GbE with TOE?).

It’s possible other Big data analytics engines are considering using IB as well.  It would seem to be a logical choice if you had even more control over the software stack.

~~~~

Comments?

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Post tags: 10GBE, BIGData, EMC Isilon, ExaFLOP computing, Flextronics, Hadoop, HDFS, HPC, IB EDR, IB QDR, IBTA, Intel, IPoIB, Melanox, OpenFabrics Alliance, Qlogic, supercomputing clusters, Voltaire

Exposed by AMagill (cc) (from Flickr)

Recent research from MIT on a Streamlining Chip Design was in the news today.  The report described work was done  by Nyrav Dave PhD and Myron King to create a new programming language, BlueSpec that can convert specifications into hardware chip design (Verilog) or compile it into software programming (C++).

BlueSpec designers can tag (annotate) system modules to be hardware or software.  The intent of the project is to make it easier to decide what is done in hardware versus software.  By specifying this decision using a language attribute, it should make architectural hardware-software tradeoffs much easier to do and as a result, delay that decision until much later in the development cycle.

Hardware-software tradeoffs

Making good hardware-software tradeoffs are especially important in mobile handsets where power efficiency and system performance requirements often clash.  It’s not that unusual in these systems that functionality is changed from hardware to software implementations or vice versa.

The problem is that the two different implementations (hardware or software) use different design languages and would typically require a complete re-coding effort to change, delaying system deployment significantly.  Which makes such decisions all the more important to get right early on in system architecture.

In contrast, with BlueSpec, all it would take is a different tag to have the language translate the module into Verilog (chip design language) or C++ (software code).

Better systems through easier hardware design

There is a long running debate around commodity hardware versus special purpose hardware designed systems in storage systems (see Commodity Hardware Always Loses and Commodity Hardware Debate Heats-up Again).  We believe that there will continuing place for special purpose built hardware in storage.  Also, I would go on to say this is likely the case in networking, server systems as well as telecommunications handsets/back-office equipment.

The team at MIT specifically created their language to help create more efficient mobile phone hand sets. But from my perspective it has an equally valid part to play in storage and other systems.

Hardware and software design, more similar than different

Nowadays, hardware and software designers are all just coders using different languages.

Yes hardware engineers have more design constraints and have to deal with the real, physical world of electronics. But what they deal with most, is a hardware design language and design verification tools tailored for their electronic design environment.

Doing hardware design is not that much different from software developers coding in a specific language like C++ or Java.  Software coders must also be able to understand their framework/virtual machine/OS environment their code operates in to produce something that works.  Perhaps, design verification tools don’t work or even exist in software as much as they should but that is more a subject for research than a distinction between the two types of designers.

—-

Whether BlueSpec is the final answer or not isn’t as interesting as the fact that it has taken a first step to unify system design.  Being able to decide much later in the process whether to make a module hardware or software will benefit all system designers and should get products out with less delay.  But getting hardware designers and software coders talking more, using the same language to express their designs can’t help but result in better/tighter integrated designs which end up benefiting the world.

Comments?

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Post tags: BlueSpec, C++, Commodity hardware, Design language, Design tradeoffs, Hardware-software design, special purpose hardware, Verilog

IBM Neuromorphic Chip (from Wired story)

What does Watson, Neuromorphic chips and race track memory have in common. They have all emerged out of IBM research labs.

I have been wondering for some time now how it is that a company known for it’s cutting edge research but lack of product breakthrough has transformed itself into an innovation machine.

There has been a sea change in the research at IBM that is behind the recent productization of tecnology.

Talking the past couple of days with various IBMers at STGs Smarter Computing Forum, I have formulate a preliminary hypothesis.

At first I heard that there was a change in the way research is reviewed for product potential. Nowadays, it almost takes a business case for research projects to be approved and funded. And the business case needs to contain a plan as to how it will eventually reach profitability for any project.

In the past it was often said that IBM invented a lot of technology but productized only a little of it. Much of their technology would emerge in other peoples products and IBM would not recieve anything for their efforts (other than some belated recognition for their research contribution).

Nowadays, its more likely that research not productized by IBM is at least licensed from them after they have patented the crucial technologies that underpin the advance. But it’s just as likely if it has something to do with IT, the project will end up as a product.

One executive at STG sees three phases to IBM research spanning the last 50 years or so.

Phase I The ivory tower:

IBM research during the Ivory Tower Era looked a lot like research universities but without the tenure of true professorships. Much of the research of this era was in materials and pure mathematics.

I suppose one example of this period was Mandlebrot and fractals. It probably had a lot of applications but little of them ended up in IBM products and mostly it advanced the theory and practice of pure mathematics/systems science.

Such research had little to do with the problems of IT or IBM’s customers. The fact that it created pretty pictures and a way of seeing nature in a different light was an advance to mankind but it didn’t have much if any of an impact to IBM’s bottom line.

Phase II Joint project teams

In IBM research’s phase II, the decision process on which research to move forward on now had people from not just IBM research but also product division people. At least now there could be a discussion across IBM’s various divisions on how the technology could enhance customer outcomes. I am certain profitability wasn’t often discussed but at least it was no longer purposefully ignored.

I suppose over time these discussions became more grounded in fact and business cases rather than just the belief in the value of the research for research sake. Technological roadmaps and projects were now looked at from how well they could impact customer outcomes and how such technology enabled new products and solutions to come to market.

Phase III Researchers and product people intermingle

The final step in IBM transformation of research involved the human element. People started moving around.

Researchers were assigned to the field and to product groups and product people were brought into the research organization. By doing this, ideas could cross fertilize, applications could be envisioned and the last finishing touches needed by new technology could be envisioned, funded and implemented. This probably led to the most productive transition of researchers into product developers.

On the flip side when researchers returned back from their multi-year product/field assignments they brought a new found appreciation of problems encountered in the real world. That combined with their in depth understanding of where technology could go helped show the path that could take research projects into new more fruitful (at least to IBM customers) arenas. This movement of people provided the final piece in grounding research in areas that could solve customer problems.

In the end, many research projects at IBM may fail but if they succeed they have the potential to make change IT as we know it.

I heard today that there were 700 to 800 projects in IBM research today if any of them have the potential we see in the products shown today like Watson in Healthcare and Neuromorphic chips, exciting times are ahead.

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Post tags: IBM Research, IBM Smarter Computing Forum, Neuromorphic chips, Project management, racetrack memory, Research management, Watson

Toyota Hybrid Synergy Drive Decal: RAC Future Car Challenge by Dominic's pics (cc) (from Flickr)

I saw where Seagate announced the next generation of their Momentus XT Hybrid (SSD & Disk) drive this week.  We haven’t discussed Hybrid drives much on this blog but it has become a viable product family.

I am not planning on describing the new drive specs here as there was an excellent review by Greg Schulz at StorageIOblog.

However, the question some in the storage industry have had is can Hybrid drives supplant data center storage.  I believe the answer to that is no and I will tell you why.

Hybrid drive secrets

The secret to Seagate’s Hybrid drive lies in its FAST technology.  It provides a sort of automated disk caching that moves frequently accessed OS or boot data to NAND/SSD providing quicker access times.

Storage subsystem caching logic has been around in storage subsystems for decade’s now, ever since the IBM 3880 Mod 11&13 storage control systems came out last century.  However, these algorithms have gotten much more sophisticated over time and today can make a significant difference in storage system performance.  This can be easily witnessed by the wide variance in storage system performance on a per disk drive basis (e.g., see my post on Latest SPC-2 results – chart of the month).

Enterprise storage use of Hybrid drives?

The problem with using Hybrid drives in enterprise storage is that caching algorithms are based on some predictability of access/reference patterns.  When you have a Hybrid drive directly connected to a server or a PC it can view a significant portion of server IO (at least to the boot/OS volume) but more importantly, that boot/OS data is statically allocated, i.e., doesn’t move around all that much.   This means that one PC session looks pretty much like the next PC session and as such, the hybrid drive can learn an awful lot about the next IO session just by remembering the last one.

However, enterprise storage IO changes significantly from one storage session (day?) to another.  Not only are the end-user generated database transactions moving around the data, but the data itself is much more dynamically allocated, i.e., moves around a lot.

Backend data movement is especially true for automated storage tiering used in subsystems that contain both SSDs and disk drives. But it’s also true in systems that map data placement using log structured file systems.  NetApp Write Anywhere File Layout (WAFL) being a prominent user of this approach but other storage systems do this as well.

In addition, any fixed, permanent mapping of a user data block to a physical disk location is becoming less useful over time as advanced storage features make dynamic or virtualized mapping a necessity.  Just consider snapshots based on copy-on-write technology, all it takes is a write to have a snapshot block be moved to a different location.

Nonetheless, the main problem is that all the smarts about what is happening to data on backend storage primarily lies at the controller level not at the drive level.  This not only applies to data mapping but also end-user/application data access, as cache hits are never even seen by a drive.  As such, Hybrid drives alone don’t make much sense in enterprise storage.

Maybe, if they were intricately tied to the subsystem

I guess one way this could all work better is if the Hybrid drive caching logic were somehow controlled by the storage subsystem.  In this way, the controller could provide hints as to which disk blocks to move into NAND.  Perhaps this is a way to distribute storage tiering activity to the backend devices, without the subsystem having to do any of the heavy lifting, i.e., the hybrid drives would do all the data movement under the guidance of the controller.

I don’t think this likely because it would take industry standardization to define any new “hint” commands and they would be specific to Hybrid drives.  Barring standards, it’s an interface between one storage vendor and one drive vendor.  Probably ok if you made both storage subsystem and hybrid drives but there aren’t any vendor’s left that does both drives and the storage controllers.

~~~~

So, given the state of enterprise storage today and its continuing proclivity to move data around accross its backend storage,  I believe Hybrid drives won’t be used in enterprise storage anytime soon.

Comments?

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Post tags: backend storage, Caching, enterprise storage, FAST technology, hybrid drives, log structured files, NAND, NetApp, Seagate, Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid drive, SPC-2, SSD, WAFL

perfection, brasilia april 2006 by seier+seier (cc) (from Flickr)

Heard a story yesterday about Smart Windows on NPR .  They were talking about new smart glass technology which uses a nano-crystal film coating to window panes that can change heat transmission characteristics of the glass.

Apparently the nano-crystal film can electronically change their orientation to reflect or transmit heat. Thus their heat transmissivity could be changed by supplying a low-voltage current to the window coating.

Problems with todays windows

The problem with todays Low-E glass windows today is that they reflect heat year round. In summer that’s great, but if it’s winter or cold and there is abundant sunlight, this stinks.  With smart windows that can change their heat transmission, one can have the best of Low-E glass and dumb windows.

Integrating current smart windows could be problematic

The story went on to discuss that ideally the smart windows would somehow be tied into a building’s heating/cooling systems used to trigger the changes to the nano-crystal coating.  Seems like a good idea for a new building construction but not so good for current housing and commercial buildings due to the retrofit requirements.

Also, the fact that a building/house is heating mode doesn’t necessarily indicate that windows should transmit heat.  The only time they should really do that is when sunlight is hitting the window pain and it’s cold out.

Ideally a building with smart glass on all four sides would have windows to the east transmit heat on winter mornings but reflect heat the rest of the day, windows to the south transmit heat most of a winter daylight times, those to the west transmit during the afternoon, and windows to the north reflect heat all the time.  But any heat transmission would only if it was a sunny day.

Smart-er window design

For the current 130.6M houses and 4.7M commercial buildings already constructed in the USA it would be better if the smart window systems were isolated and separate from a buildings other systems and somehow more self-contained/passively-managed.

This could be done by including solar photo-voltaics tied to a thermocouple/thermoelectric device in the window that would trigger heat transmission only during sunlight and its cold outside. That way we could use the solar voltaics to power the transition to heat-transmitting as well.  The smart window would even be better if it somehow could be designed to require the solar power to keep it transmitting heat.  That way as the sunlight stops shining on the window, it starts reflecting heat.

TCO of smart-er windows

While any self-contained/passively managed smart-er window might cost more up front than a dumber smart window just connected to the buildings thermostat, it would probably be cheaper when all costs are accounted for.

• With a non-self contained smart window, one needs an even smarter thermostat (driving a signal when in heating mode even though the furnace was not needed),  one has to run (low-voltage) wiring to plug into each and every smart window in a building and each window still requires some logic to transmit/transform the signal from the buildings thermostat to the window’s nano-crystal film.
• With a self-contained smart window, one would need include additional control logic, a solar photovoltaic strip/cell and a thermocouple but it wouldn’t need to plug into any other building system.

What do you think?

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Post tags: Energy efficiency, green energy, Low-e glass, Nano-crystal coatings, Smart windows

Prison Planet by AZRainman (cc) (from Flickr)

[Long post] Read another intriguing post by David Vellente at Wikibon today about the emergence of IT shops becoming service organizations to their industries using the cloud to hosting these services.  I am not in complete agreement with Dave but he certainly describes a convincing picture.

His main points are:

• Cloud storage and cloud computing are emerging as a favorite platform for IT-as-a-service.
• Specialization and economics of scale will generate an IT-as-a-service capability for any organization’s information processing needs.

I would have to say another tenet of his overall discussion is that IT matters, a lot and I couldn’t agree more.

Cloud reality

For some reason I have been talking a lot about cloud storage this past couple of weeks, in multiple distinct venues.  On the one hand, I was talking with a VAR the other day and they were extremely excited about the opportunity in cloud storage. It seems getting SMB customers to sign up for a slice of storage is easy and once they have that, getting them to use more becomes a habit they can’t get rid of.

I thought maybe the enterprise level would be immune to such inducements, but no.  Another cloud storage gateway vendor,  StorSimple, I talked with recently was touting the great success they were having displacing tier 2 storage in the enterprise.

Lately, I heard that some small businesses/startups have decided to abandon their own IT infrastructure altogether and depend entirely on cloud offerings from Amazon, RackSpace and others for all they need.  They argue that such infrastructure, for all its current faults, will have less downtime than anything they could create on their own within a limited budget.

So, cloud seems to be taking off, everywhere I look.

Vertical support for IT as a service

Dave mentions plenty in his lengthy post that a number of sophisticated IT organizations are taking their internal services and becoming IT-as-a-service profit centers.  Yes, hard to disagree with this one as well.

But, it’s not the end of IT organizations

However, where I disagree with Dave is that he sees this as a winning solution, taking over all internal IT activities.  In his view, either your IT group becomes an external service profit center or it’s destined to be replaced by someone else’s service offering(s).

I don’t believe this. To say that IT as a service will displace 50+ years of technology development in the enterprise is just overstatement.

Dave talks about WINTEL, displacing mainframes as the two monopolies created in IT.  But the fact remains, WINTEL has not eliminated mainframes.  Mainframes still exist and arguably, today are still expanding through out the world.

Dave states that the introduction of WINTEL reduced the switching cost of mainframes, and that the internet and the cloud that follows, have reduced the costs yet again. I agree.  But, that doesn’t mean that switching cost is 0.

Ask anyone whether SalesForce.com switching cost inhibits them from changing services and more than likely they will say yes.  Switching costs have come down, but they are still a viable barrier to change.

Cloud computing and storage generates similar switching costs not to mention the time it takes to transfer TBs of data over a WAN.  Whether a cloud service uses AWS interface, OpenStack, Azzure or any of the other REST/SOAP cloud storage/cloud computing protocols is a formidable barrier to change.  It would be great if OpenStack were to take over but it hasn’t yet, and most likely won’t in the long run.  Mainly because the entrenched suppliers don’t want to help their competition.

IT matters, a lot to my organization

What I see happening is not that much different from what Dave sees, it’s only a matter of degree.  Some IT shops will become service organizations to their vertical but there will remain a large proportion of IT shops that see

• That their technology is a differentiator.
• That their technology is not something they want their competition using.
• That their technology is too important to their corporate advantage to sell to others.

How much of this is reality vs. fiction is another matter.

Nonetheless, I firmly believe that a majority of IT shops that exist today will not convert to using IT as a service.   Some of this is due to sunk costs but a lot will be due to the belief that they are truly better than the service.

That’s not to say that new organizations, just starting out might be more interested in utilizing IT as a service.  For these entities, service offerings are going to be an appealing alternative.

However, a small portion of these startups may just as likely conclude that they can do better or believe it’s more important for them to develop their own IT services to help them get ahead.  Similarly, how much of this is make believe is TBD.

In the end, I believe IT as a service will take it’s place alongside IT developed services and IT outsourced development as yet another capability that any company can deploy to provide information processing for their organization.

The real problem

In my view, the real problem with IT developed services today is development disease.  Most organizations, would like increased functionality, and want it ASAP but they just can’t develop working functionality fast enough.  I call slow functionality development, missing critical features with lots of bugs development disease.  And it’s everywhere today and has never really gone away.

Some of this is due to poor IT infrastructure, some is due to the inability to use new development frameworks, and some of it is due to a lack of skills.  If IT had some pill they could take to help them develop business processing faster, consuming less resources with much fewer bugs and fuller functionality, they would never consider IT as a service.

That’s where the new frameworks of Ruby on Rails, SpringForce and the like are exciting. Their promise is providing faster functionality with fewer failures. When that happens, organizations will move away from IT as a service in droves, and back to internally developed capabilities.

But, we’re not there yet.

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Post tags: Cloud computing, Cloud Storage, Cloud storage gateways, Development disease, Development frameworks, IT internal development, IT-as-a-service