Jevon’s Paradox is the proposition that technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource. When that increase is not accompanied by any more than organic growth in resource management, it can result in a resource crunch. Simon Wardley of the CSC Leadership Forum has often pointed out that, whilst cheaper operations costs and reduced capital spending should signal a reduction in TCO, the truth is quite the opposite. This argument is rather interesting on its own, but I see the greater issue for Cloud to be resource starvation. There are several parallels which reflect that, despite observed reductions in TCO, the resource crunch has resulted in both increased costs and reduced service.

We have witnessed this effect in the mobile space, where mobile bandwidth has been consumed at an alarming rate with the emergence of data services. AT&T’s iPhone service in the US the last few years has only highlighted this, with the network brought to its knees in Manhattan, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and other major metropolitan centres. Advances in the utilisation of mobile network resources saw their near exhaustion in less than a decade. This has been accelerated and exacerbated by the common practise of planning infrastructure after the fact. Other regions have fared better, such as South Korea, Japan, and Europe, yet at the price of resourcing and implementing broad infrastructure projects.

Will the Public Cloud be the next usage model that only increases resource consumption? The present rate of adoption, for example, by small businesses and social network games of Amazon Web Services, seems to suggest so. These are early adopters, yet the benefits of Cloud, together with these trends, are significant enough to strongly indicate only an increase in consumption.

Despite all the buzz to the contrary, compute and storage resources are finite, andnetwork resources continue to provide the principal bottleneck. Presently, dominant Public Cloud campaigns gloss over, or entirely ignore, this finite nature. The more compute, storage and network resources transform into utilities, the greater the exponentiation of consumption. Virtualization only accelerates the consumption rate, given the increase in server density. Without understanding this, increased Cloud adoption will be pursued with poor management of resources, and, resultingly, costs will increase to a point where they are uneconomical.

Resource management will grow in importance as inter-connectivity and cloud consumption increase. Although billing and metering have developed to a certain degree within Cloud service providers, this has not been approached in a manner that would truly manage the use of resources. Much has been developed to support this at the virtualization layer, yet not at the service layer. Resource management aims to address this gap, by enabling actions to be taken with workloads based upon service level agreements and policies, resource profiles and how they map to workload execution within resource pools and individual nodes.

This impacts both TCO and ROI. TCO can be maintained at a consistent level of efficacy through managing resource availability and constraints, to optimise the cost-vs-service ratio. ROI can be targeted and achieved through assurance of resource availability. Without resource management, costs can easily increase beyond efficacy, and pathfinding activities suffocated, as resources are heavily consumed and capacity exhausted.

Whilst a high-volume, low-margin strategy suits a number of business models, those looking to the Cloud to execute their mission-critical or highly-regulated processing need more than an optimistic RAS model to assure their operations. Tenant visibility into the Cloud (more on this in my next post) combined with fine-grained resource management will make this actionable.

[Charlton]

As a Technology Strategist, my charter is to drive bold technologies to transform my organisation, deliver world-class technical innovation, know the external research community, know my organisation, and provide technical leadership. I thus spend a significant amount of my time looking for how to achieve that transformation through “innovation“. With a smaller portion of my time, I present at a number of conferences on these strategies, their associated technologies, and how they can be applied to solve real-world problems.

One recent presentation was given at CloudCamp Hamburg. One of the reasons I chose to do so was to reach a new audience. The sessions at the event were quite good, focussing on developments in the business models, usage models and technologies of the Cloud. Yet, I read posts such as this one, and wonder that, based on my experience in Europe and the Americas, if there a) is a problem with the state of innovation in Europe, or rather, b) the taxonomy of innovation exemplified in the post is a problem in and of itself.

Anyone who has spent any time with me will know that I am not one for fussing about with taxonomies. I feel that, essentially, these are a tertiary consideration, and to be addressed after what I consider to be the ‘real work of taking a concept from idea to reality. My personal opinion is that taxonomies are pedantry, used to constrain, limit and control the process of innovation, and are too often used as a device to be heard, rather than to solve any problems of significance. Yet, when I hear or read the use of the word ‘innovation‘ or phrase ‘big picture’ to focus only on business models, and ignore usage and technology, think there’s something amiss. If we limit ‘innovation‘ to *exclude* usage and technology advances, we are truly advancing style over substance.

Most of the widely recognized innovations in history which have advanced the standard of living for many in modern civilisation arose from usage or technology innovation addressing very specific, detailed problems. The innovation may have encompassed a grand vision, but that vision arose from connecting the dots which started with solving a specific problem. To make the blanket claim that innovation is hindered by being too “busy nitpicking on time consuming details” makes as much sense as reality television. An artist worth the enduring attention of the public will need to have mastered the fundamentals of their craft; a reality ‘star’ will exit the spotlight in relatively short order (although not fast enough for some of us) since their recognition was purely situational, and they had not addressed any of the ‘time consuming details’ necessary to sustain any career in entertainment.

Based on my assumptions, the iPhone is 10% innovation and 90% evolution. The device has truly been innovative in its enablement of Augmented Reality – Apple improved a number of existing technologies such as touch screen, application integration and metadata management, to provide a usage model which was a step beyond the expectations of a mobile device. The innovation lay in how the individual technologies were deployed to provide a better (and now widely adopted/mimicked) usage model; the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Yet even the improvements in the parts, not to say new usage model, required a foundation rooted in time consuming details. Ask any Apple engineer working on any of the technologies that were developed or revised, and they can attest to how much effort – deep in the bowels of hardware, software and/or user experience engineering – was required of each and every one of them to deliver them.

The innovation of Rich Internet Applications (RIA), and subsequently the Rich Services Cloud – something with which I have been intimately involved – arose from similar efforts. The underlying engines supporting this, such as Flash, had already been widely deployed for nearly a decade, but it was the understanding of the limitations of Web 1.0, at the level of nitpicking on time consuming details, married with the vision for a rich yet agile development and user experience, that drove the development of platforms such as Flex and Apollo/AIR, Silverlight, and now HTML5/Chrome. Each of these implementations of RIA innovation recognised that the real world, devil-in-the-detail problems of Web 1.0′s fully remoted architecture were non-performant, did not scale, and limited the web experience to very simple, highly constrained models

Innovation is not in the vision itself, or in the nano-level details, but in how recognising the vision that can be realised from creating or enhancing bits at the level of time consuming detail, and successfully mapping them. Business across Europe may not have adopted North American-style Public Cloud, with its Lowest Common Denominator (LCD) user experience and generally coarse Service Level Agreements (SLAs), but that does not reflect their difficulty with innovation. Rather, it reflects that organisations across Europe have chosen to focus their energies solving some very important problems, after already bravely diving into related areas such as the Open Business Initiative wholly, and learning important lessons from such moves. Europe has proven itself truly innovative in business models, usage models, and technology, as exemplified in it’s world-leading or -challenging development in areas of mobile, automation, and web, to name a few. European organisations have not been shy to embark on bold endeavours to transform their business and usage models by developing, adapting or adopting innovative technologies.

Likewise, I’ve encountered plenty of innovation in North America arising from the unabashed confrontation of time-consuming-detail problems presented by the challenges of Cloud Computing. There have been plenty of clever applications of Cloud, but no matter how cool they may be, the real innovation, in my definition, is in the usage models and technologies that have enabled them together with a number of not-so-cool apps. Throwing something on the Cloud with a slick interface and a minimal SLA isn’t innovation. Developing the foundations for HTML5 and Native Client Libraries, developing MapReduce and Hadoop, developing image recognition algorithms that scale by shifting cycles across compute resources based on capabilities and utilisation  – these mapped to new business and usage models is innovation.

[Charlton]

The one pervasive theme from this year’s VMworld has been mobility. Although the official positioning has focussed on server-centric models, the media and third party vendors have focussed on how workloads, compute and quality of experience can be moved across devices, using local resources to the fullest. Mobility is the emerging vector in cloud computing and virtualisation, and the reasons for this are clear.

Imagine you’re a new employee in the and it’s your first day on the job. You expect from past experience at other workplaces, that you’ll get an outdated PC, a desk phone, and maybe some training. You also expect that you may be staring at your cubicle walls for some hours before IT gets around to you.

Rather, let’s say you get a visit from your department admin. She hands you a voucher for, say, $1,500,  and a thumb drive. The admin explains that the voucher  is for purchasing the computing device of your choice, and the the thumb drive authenticates both you *and* your device to the network, where your OS and applications are waiting to be deployed to whatever device you may use.

Welcome to the mobile workplace.  If you think this scenario is too far-fetched, it’s time to rethink. Technically, it’s already here.

Traditionally, mobility has meant carrying around a standardized, company-issued PC weighing 8 to 10 pounds, fully loaded with an operating system, a stack of standard applications – many of which you won’t use – and all your data. The more you carry it around, the heavier it seems, and it’s a never-ending chore for you and IT to keep your hardware and software updated, and your data secure.

True mobility, however, provides device independence combined with device targetting. This enables the applications and data to be deployable, employing isolation, to a variety of devices, and grants you access to them from wherever you are. For example, you would choose a device for your corporate work, your home notebook, smartphone, mobile Internet device (MID), etc. Virtualisation technologies would employ a container, provided by your corporate IT, that can run on any hardware that supports the virtualisation platform. IT manages the container, deploying IT applications and data to it on the device. The environment is protected because it runs within a virtual environment employing memory and I/O isolation. Employees could run the IT environment alongside personal applications and data on the same device hardware, keeping both environments safely protected from each other.

Mobility also requires ability to move workloads from device to device, based on immediate needs, and maintain task continuity, is critical to user productivity. Employees performing tasks on one device in transit often need to, or can benefit from, moving to another device at home, or the office. The continuity of performing those tasks requires that the workload be moved, or synchronized, to the other device when that device is accessed. Users can then seamlessly switch from device to device, keeping their tasks intact.

Two major emerging technology trends behind the concept are workspace virtualisation and the consumerisation of IT.

Traditionally, technology became available to enterprises first and spread to consumers later. But a reverse trend—consumerization of IT—is emerging rapidly. A variety of technologies are being adopted by consumers first, who then informally introduce them into the enterprise. As the consumer market explodes with new products—lighter and smaller notebooks, netbooks, and feature-rich MIDs─employees want platforms they’re familiar with from personal use. And they’re using personal devices for work. The reality for IT shops everywhere is that consumer devices are crossing over into the workplace in increasing numbers. This unavoidable osmosis poses a real challenge for IT departments to manage and secure the maverick devices.

In the traditional computing platform model without any virtualisation, the IT applications and data become entwined in the registry, file system, and even the hardware itself. This model is complex and expensive to manage. One of IT’s largest costs is device hardware support. For employees, the model is limiting too, with little choice of client devices and an inability to run IT apps and data seamlessly alongside personal applications and data.

With workspace virtualisation, the entire software environment—applications, data, and IT services—are moved to a low-overhead virtual container and “decoupled” from the underlying subsystems. It can be managed and updated centrally and distributed to a variety of device hardware devices. IT could configure different containers, and distribute them to different hardware platforms. There could be a standard Windows* container, a standard Linux* container, a purely Open Source container, a Software Developer’s container, etc.

The result of implementing consumerisation and virtualisation is a flexible, platform-independent approach that can increase employees’ choices and productivity and allow IT to focus resources on providing and supporting IT services, not on managing the platform.

Combining multiple emerging technologies, a number of vendors have used used standard corporate and consumer notebooks and desktops with Intel^® Core™ i5/i7 processors running Windows or Linux. At VMworld, RingCube demonstrated deploying workspace virtualisation technologies and policy management software, using Intel Virtualisation Technology™, illustrating that along with all traditional device functionality, workspace virtualisation was used to access IT applications over the corporate
network from home and office locations, clearly illustrating the feasibility of mobility. For more information on the joint RingCube/Intel efforts, see the white paper “Hardware Assisted Workspace Virtualization“.

Multiple technology vendors have defined both strategies and products with the potential to transform the way IT delivers services, including Citrix XenClient, Wanova Mirage, Phoenix Technologies’ HyperSpace, and Parallels Workstation. Combined with the continued media feedback at VMworld 2010, it is apparent that the future is here with true mobility.

[Charlton]

RingCube announced a series of enhancements to their vDesk Desktop Virtualization solution in security, performance, management and usability, which were developed in association with Intel. The capabilities introduced include:

• Hardened security features, including pre-authentication host checking, to protect against keystroke loggers; and granular logging for regulation compliance;
• Performance improvements to their MobileSync features, including compression of encrypted workspaces and block-level differencing
• Management and usability features that enable deployment of vDesk across the network faster; as well as higher levels of resiliency with improved architecture; and usability improvements for USB-attached printers.

RingCube is demonstrating vDesk solution on Intel vPro devices VMworld 2010 this week.

Learn more about Workspace Virtualization from Intel, CSC, Gartner Research, and RingCube at: http://www.DesktopVirtualizationOptimized.com

[Charlton]