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Dave: NASA backs off OpenStack development
NASA’s move is not surprising given the context. For one thing, the space agency — which is already navigating a new role as the U.S. discontinued the space shuttle effort — is really not a software development shop. When NASA and Rackspace started down this road two years ago many of the NASA software developers were actually contractors at a company called ANSO Labs, which Rackspace subsequently acquired. Many of the rest of the NASA OpenStack contingent also left the agency to pursue OpenStack-related work at Rackspace or other companies, including Nebula (not the same thing as the Nebula project Petraska mentioned ) or Piston Computing (see disclosure).
Today, it is no longer a question of when IT will align with business leaders, but how. That is the conclusion of a new report from Forrester Research, which describes the policies and procedures for implementing cloud computing in the corporate environment.
These are required, according to Forrester, because the traditional model of IT management under the rigid control of the IT department has now become restrictive and outdated. Business managers want the power to rapidly procure and provision the technology they need, unhindered by the diktats of an “authoritarian” IT department, say the firm’s analysts.
“Underlying this new model of business and IT is a shift away from rules – IT specifying exactly what and how all technologies are adopted and applied to overcome business problems – to one of business working within a series of ‘guard rails’ that provide softer guidance on how best to select, choose, and consume cloud services,” writes Forrester analyst James Staten in the report.
More and more of our BML clients are asking for Cloud Service Brokerage services like this. IT organizations that aren’t prepared to be CSBs can get help to assist in implementing cloud governance as well as selecting the right vendors that might be too new to have made it onto a Forrester or Gartner analysis yet.
For my money this also means that organizations, on average, are probably not investing enough money into architecture and application portfolio management. Without a solid understanding of your application and infrastructure topology it’s very difficult to adopt the cloud smartly. From my experience only one in five of the environments I walk into nowadays have a solid understanding of this SOA-related piece. Without it you can’t be a CSB and most likely are in need of new leadership.
JP:
Discussions from EMC World regarding the future of enterprise storage. Really interesting discussion with some leaders in this space about the impact of growing data demands in the face of smaller capital expenditures. How can the enterprise keep up or compete with SaaS providers? Big conundrum coming. SaaS providers incorporate storage costs into the price of the service and can still deliver less expensively in many cases than the enterprise? Should the enterprise consider keeping up with the Jonses or rationalize storage use cooperatively rather than competitively? Is the enterprise trying to compete with cloud storage providers or at least match expectations of users comparing GMail and YouTube like services? Finally, what impact will predictive analytics play on the enterprise’s ability to deliver matching storage requirements? Big data tells us we no longer need to throw things away, but, what many people don’t realize is that a single byte of data may be copied upwards 3 times to support BC/DR.
