Oracle, SAP blink on fees Jive’s cloud freebie More open ...

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informationweek.com
Oracle, SAP blink on fees 19 | Jive’s cloud freebie 26 | More open to open source? 51 Why IT service catalogs work 63 | Of RBIs and H-1Bs 72
Forget President Obama’s Twitter account. Recovery.gov will show whether government’s really becoming more open. p.54 [ Get more government IT coverage at informationweek.com/government ]
Copyright 2009 United Business Media LLC. Important Note: This PDF is provided solely as a reader service. It is not intended for reproduction or public distribution. For article reprints, e-prints and permissions please contact: Wright’s Reprints, 1-877-652-5295 / [email protected]
informationweek.com May 11, 2009 5
Transparency 2.0 Recovery.gov promises to let anyone track the $787 billion being spent to jump-start the economy. It’s a test of the president’s faith that tech can improve transparency.
19 Price Break Oracle and SAP slow fee hikes
Content Rich Why’s OpenText buying Vignette?
20 New Management SpringSource extends its reach with Hyperic acquisition
Flu Tracker Hospital makes quick work of app to track swine flu
24 Linux On PCs Linux must prove it does something better if it’s to grab desktop share
Self-Service Apps Citrix store takes a note from iTunes
App Expansion IBM buys data discovery vendor
26 Caught In The Cloud Jive lures customers with EC2
Mainframe Makeover CA modernizes mainframe software
28 Preventive Care Tools aid performance of e-medical records
31 Windows In Waiting User testing kicks up good and bad of Windows 7
[QUICKTAKES]
CONTENTS THE BUSINESS VALUE OF TECHNOLOGY May 11, 2009 Issue 1,230
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51
Anatomy Of The Cloud Hold Everything Economic realities are forcing companies to consider the benefits— notably cost savings—of cloud storage, but don’t overlook the risks
Our Research Open Options Open source software offers real savings, but don’t move too quickly
Contacts & Feedback 10 Editorial Contacts 12 Feedback 68 Advertiser and Editorial Indexes 68 Sales Contacts
Technology Showcase Assess the latest products with peers and providers. Register at: interop.com/lasvegas
May 17 to 21 Mandalay Bay Convention Center
upcoming events: Interop Las Vegas
8 Links Research And Connect InformationWeek’s Analytics Reports, events, videos, and more
14 Global CIO By Bob Evans A tiny hospital’s having big success with electronic health records
16 CIO Profiles One Regret A CIO tells of a vendor he wishes he had replaced
63 Tech Strategy Pick And Choose IT service catalogs are popular, but tough to execute
70 Practical Analysis By Art Wittmann Find out where IT pros look for information (and where they don’t)
72 Down To Business By Rob Preston Sometimes IT, like baseball, needs to look abroad for talented players
[CONTENTS]
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8 May 11, 2009 informationweek.com
IT Salaries: Meager Raises, Solid Prospects Job security is shrinking, and concerns are rising about the IT career path. But overall, IT careers are looking safer than many others, according to our annual survey.
informationweek.com/salarysurvey2009
Business Case For Social Networks Companies are putting these technologies to work like never before. But with no hard metrics for measuring ROI, they’re finding other ways to justify the expense and measure value.
informationweek.com/alert/socialnetworks
Predictive Analysis: A Matter Of Survival In an uncertain economy, even healthy companies are taking a hard look at their fast-changing demand data to spot trends. The goal: improve forecasts and revive revenue.
informationweek.com/alert/demanddata
Stronger Application Performance Subpar app performance has an impact all over companies—and we must do better. Find out how to boost employees performance and meet customer expectations.
apm.informationweek.com
Next-Gen Web Apps While upcoming Web applications will combine the rich- ness of the desktop and the networking of the Internet, there are concerns that still must be addressed.
informationweek.com/tw/nextgen
What Worries Information Security Pros This InformationWeek Analytics Report details how security managers can prioritize their defense efforts and plan for the coming year.
stateofsecurity.informationweek.com
DATA-LOSS WORRIES You’d expect that organizations strive to protect their data at all costs. But only 14% of the 218 business technology pros we surveyed believe their data protection capabilities meet all of their needs. What types of information are they most con- cerned about losing?
51% Social Security numbers
34% Credit card numbers
Find out more in our report, free for a limited time: datalossprevention.informationweek.com
Intel is working on materials that can change their shape, and the possibili- ties are mind-bog- gling. Intel’s Jason Campbell explains. informationweek.com/ video/shape
Nominate A Top Government IT Group InformationWeek will highlight innovative government IT organizations in an upcoming issue. Nominate an agency by submitting an essay—the deadline’s been extended to May 15. Find out more: informationweek.com/poll/govit
Global CIO: When IT Auditors Knock If you’re not reviewing your IT systems at least once per quarter, you might find your- self and your team at risk when the internal auditors come calling. informationweek.com/1228/blog_kpmg.htm
How Virtualization Pays Off Attend a virtual event on how virtualization is driving value from the desktop to the data center. It happens May 20. Find out more and register: techweb.com/virtualization
Get Published Upload your white paper to the TechWeb Digital Library, and find tons of reports, case studies, and other presenta- tions to help with your tech research. informationweek.com/digital_library
Resources to Research, Connect, CommentLinks InformationWeek Analytics Take a deep dive with these reports
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Things To Come: Intel shows off some cool, futuristic technology[
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Bob Evans Senior VP and Global CIO Dir., [email protected] 412-661-3091
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J. Nicholas Hoover Senior Editor Desktop software, Enterprise 2.0,collaboration [email protected] 516-562-5032
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ADVISORY BOARD
Robert Carter Executive VP and CIO, FedEx
Michael Cuddy VP and CIO, Toromont Industries
Laurie Douglas Senior CIO, Publix Super Markets
Dan Drawbaugh CIO, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
Kent Kushar VP and CIO, E.&J. Gallo Winery
Carolyn Lawson CIO, California Public Utilities Commission
Jason Maynard Software Analyst
Jeffrey Neville CIO, Eastern Mountain Sports
Denis O’Leary Former Executive VP, Chase.com
C.K. Prahalad Professor of Business Administration,University of Michigan
Mykolas Rambus Head of Technol- ogy and Special Projects,Forbes Media
M.R. Rangaswami Founder, Sand Hill Group
David Smoley CIO, Flextronics
Ralph J. Szygenda Group VP and CIO, General Motors
Please direct all inquires to reporters in the relevant beat area.
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informationweek.com
Twitter And Other Social Media As Exec Tools As professionals and business leaders, we need to get our arms around the true value of enterprise social networking. —Rob Preston informationweek.com/1229/preston.htm
As someone who’s been reluctant to jump into social networking, but has realized I need to better understand these tools, I’ve found Twitter an easy way to dip a toe into these waters. Twitter has proven to be a useful and easy way to get news items and tidbits from Research In Motion, Nortel, Cisco, and other firms that provide the technology my customers use. I do feel more informed once I weed out the sales pitches. It was particularly useful to get alerts via Twitter regarding a BlackBerry outage with follow- ups that let me know it didn’t affect my end users since we use BlackBerry Enterprise Server.
With Twitter, it’s important to exercise self-control. Although I glance at the tweets that pop up throughout the day, unless I see something such as the BlackBerry outage alerts, I just do a quick read through at the end of the day. Twitter’s value is as an effi- cient way to grab your attention rather than as a collaborative tool.
Hopefully, use of Twitter won’t de- volve into just advertising and promo- tion. —Barbara J. Pouliot, Telecom- munications Administrator, Orange County Transportation Authority
VMware Still Tough To Beat, But It’s Pricey The VMware Infrastructure suite got our virtualization job done handily, but whether it’s worth the price is another matter. —Joe Hernick informationweek.com/1229/vmware.htm
Of course VMware is a little more complicated, but VMware 3.5 is a very robust platform. We’re rapidly using it to migrate physical servers to virtual ones (using the physical-to- virtual converters built in) and they are excellent! Yes, VMware may be a little complicated, but for enterprises (not SMB) they’re the mature tools that will get the job done. Ease of use can come later, but if your tools don’t work or don’t provide you with needed functionality, is ease of use really all that important? —EVVJSK
Agile Processes Go Lean A lean approach makes it more likely that agile development can deliver on its promise of software built faster and at a higher quality level. —Dave West informationweek.com/1229/ddj_agile.htm
From what I understand about agile programming, it seems to make a lot of sense for point solutions that have limited product evolutions. From an enterprise application perspective, there are two things related to requirements analysis and documentation that I’d like to see agile practitioners address, but I haven’t run across yet.
>> How does agile’s limited requirements analysis cycle work when you have multiple stakeholders with
conflicting business needs that will be using the application? If you don’t do a full requirements analysis, how do you even identify there are multiple stakeholders with conflicting needs?
>> If the app will be in production for some time and there’s only limited requirements documentation, how do you keep from having to gather the same requirements over and over each time the application evolves? With only limited requirements docs, other than doing a source code review and looking for programmer comments, how do you prevent removing a critical feature from a previous release?
I’m all for high-performance, self- managing teams performing iterative development and pushing out incre- mental deliverables to reduce risk, but I’m not sure you can use agile to create anything other than a departmental solution. For enterprise apps, if you haven’t been through a requirements analysis process, how can you can have an understanding of the environment the app will be deployed in? —Al
As a practitioner of agile development for 10 years, I’d like to compliment you on your agile development article. You effectively articulated in simple terms the pros and cons of agile development.
I suggest you dedicate more time to the fact that the existing IT staff will need to change. Of great importance is the fact that perceived stress is a bit higher, as IT staff needs to “prove” itself every month, instead of waiting for six- plus months, as is the case with the waterfall approach. Some may call out “chaos,” as “requirements are always changing,” and decide to find employ- ment at a shop that still employs waterfall. I’ve found that some people can’t make the transition and, unfortunately, need to be released. —Tampa CIO
Write to us at [email protected]
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L O B A L C I OG
L O B A L C I O uick—how much federal government money has been earmarked for electronic health records? $360 million? $3.6 billion? $36 billion? $360
billion? We’re in a time when incomprehensi- bly large dollar amounts are being tossed around like coins into a wishing well, and after too many of them the mind starts to blur.
So it was quite a shock to hear the electronic health records (EHR) success story of Adena Health System in rural southern Ohio, where CIO Marcus Bost and his team have helped make the two-hospital, 300-bed system one of the most successful EHR imple- mentations in the country.
And they’re doing it on a budget that most of us can actually com- prehend: The total EHR invest- ment at Adena will be about $16.5 million across five years, from mid- 2006 to mid-2011, Bost says.
It was also quite refreshing to hear Bost talk passionately about the potential EHRs have for helping transform health care in the United States from after-the-fact treatment to preventive approaches that will push more knowledge for staying healthy out to individuals.
“In U.S. health care today, we spend 80% of our resources on 20% of the population who have certain serious illnesses,” Bost says. “Take diabetes: If we can make this shift and proactively manage diabetes awareness and information to the front side—before they have it, or before it becomes so serious with blindness and amputations—it would make a huge difference in them leading healthier lives. But the key is we need to be able to take care of them on the front side, which we currently can’t do because we don’t have the means to help them monitor their situations and communicate with them.
“The federal government today spends
$132 billion treating diabetes. If we could shift the focus of our treatment to the front end, we could save on the huge physical and emotional toll this takes on those patients and their families, and we could achieve that without spending nearly as much money.”
Another example: Adena doesn’t have an extensive neonatal center and had to rely on phone conversations with specialists at a big hospital 70 miles away in Columbus. Of- ten—too often—newborns with unusual conditions had to be taken from their moth- ers within hours after delivery and transported by ambulance to Columbus to be seen
by specialists, with each of those trips causing considerable agony for the
families involved, as well as cost- ing $10,000, Bost says.
But a new telemedicine system lets the specialists in Columbus
review images, charts, and other info in real time, allowing Adena to
cut the number of physical transfers in the first year from 140 to 70, and in the second year from 70 to 35. “We never antici- pated we’d get such a huge success from it,” Bost says, “but the impact on the parents— they were just terrified, as you can imagine— has been huge. And at $10,000 per transfer, that’s very real money, too.”
There’s much more to this remarkable story with Bost and Adena—including their partnership with Cisco, which Bost says is “far beyond whatever I would have imag- ined”—and you can see it all in a longer version of this column at informationweek.com/ 1230/evans.htm.
Bob Evans is senior VP and director of InformationWeek’s Global CIO unit. For more Global CIO perspectives, check out informationweek.com/blog/globalcio, or write to Bob at [email protected].
A Remarkable Story
hospital system
Q
Career Track How long at current company: 10 years
Career accomplishments I’m most proud of: My involvement with two entrepreneurial endeavors. At Ex- change Data, we started one of the first e-commerce companies and sold it to Agiliti. At eBenX, I played the critical role in aligning the company’s technology and operations to deliver innovative products and po- sition the company for its initial public offering in December 1999.
Most important career influencer: David Messick, professor of leader- ship and ethics at Kellogg School of Management. He taught me two important things. First, leaders are pro- duced by the circumstances of their lives and environment rather than taught. Second, leaders aren’t per- fect. They make mistakes, and good leaders learn from their mistakes.
Decision I wish I could do over: A major software vendor tried to change a software licensing model on already licensed software in order to charge higher fees. After we obtained bids from competitors, it quickly stopped its efforts to change the licensing model and I kept the software. I wish I’d replaced the vendor, as it wasn’t serving as our business partner. Thankfully, its technology plays a less critical role in our current technology strategy.
Vision The next big thing for my industry will be ... patient-centric health care, with IT solutions that support holistic management of a patient’s health. Today, health care resembles the U.S. banking system in the 1960s: bureaucratic, fragmented,
AMIN KASSEM Executive VP and CIO, SHPS
Colleges/degrees: BS, computer sci- ence and engineering, University of Minnesota; executive MBA, Northwest- ern University/Kellogg Graduate School of Management
Leisure activities: Cooking, soccer, hiking, and travel
Last vacation: Family trip and hiking through the Canadian Rockies
Best book read recently: Team Of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Smartphone of choice: BlackBerry for business use and iPhone for personal use (need to keep them separate!)
If I weren’t a CIO, I’d be ... a chef
and impersonal. The industry has spent billions on IT, with limited benefit to physicians or patients. The future of health care IT will be modular, open platforms built around the holistic management of a patient’s health, aligning delivery of care with personal health needs.
Advice for future CIOs: Know your industry. You’re no longer the IT guy only. An effective CIO must know the business operations with a high level of intimacy. Also, partnering with your peers will help bridge many of the traditional divides between IT and the rest of the business.
On The Job Size of IT team: 320 IT pros (including developers, analysts, etc.)
Top initiatives:
>> Improve operational efficiency by developing technology to reduce implementation time and cost.
>> Deliver a customer data integration framework for multiple platforms using multiple technologies.
>> Deliver a next-generation care management system that lets individuals take control of their health care decisions.
How I measure IT effectiveness:
>> Capital productivity: Making sure developers are working on development projects.
>> Repeat work: The ratio of the number of bug fixes to new development.
>> Agility: The ability to respond to client needs quickly and accurately.
informationweek.com16 May 11, 2009
The world’s two largest enterprise software ven-
dors got the message: CIOs don’t view software maintenance fees as being as in- evitable as death and taxes.
In a surprising move, Ora- cle is giving customers a small break on fees. SAP will stagger its upcoming price increase over a longer period, and it’s promising to hit performance measures—based on its support of 100 select customers—before any fee hikes take effect.
These are relatively small gestures, but it’s a very different tone than CIOs are used to from those two vendors, which have staunchly de- fended maintenance fees as vital to the support and con-
tinued development of their enterprise platforms. In our January article on rising customer angst over maintenance fees (informationweek .com/1218/software.htm), Ora- cle president Charles Phillips said the vendor’s annual fee of 22% of the software’s license fee is never negotiable, add- ing: “We are sticklers on that”.
Oracle hasn’t budged on the 22%. But acknowledging that customers need some price relief amid the reces- sion, it’s delaying for one year fee increases that would have kicked in during 2010 on some aging software products. Its rates go from 22% to 24.2% for older software. The concession is notable as companies stretch the life of
their software these days, but it affects only a small slice of Oracle’s revenue.
Bill McDermott, SAP’s president of global field operations, had said SAP is only matching market rates with its phased-in maintenance price hike, from 17% of the software license annu- ally to 22%.
SAP planned to raise rates gradually beginning next year, reaching the maximum 22% in 2012. It’s still raising rates next year, to 18.9%, but in smaller increments that max out in 2015. Fur- thermore, SAP’s new support must meet “key performance indicators” before rate hikes
start. SAP user group repre- sentatives are working on KPIs for business continuity, business process improvement, and cost. SAP says it’s reining in pricing given “current economic conditions.”
Why the compassion? As our January article noted, this isn’t everyday grumbling by CIOs. Companies forced to cut IT budgets found immov- able fees harder than ever to swallow. And there’s pressure in some software segments from alternative models, including software as a service, open source, and third-party maintenance vendors.
—Mary Hayes Weier ([email protected])
Amid the recent burst of software acquisitions,
content management vendor OpenText’s $310 million bid last week to acquire Vi- gnette has prompted the most head scratching.
Enterprise content management is a growth market, and OpenText, as the last independent amid growing gi- ants, needed to bulk up. But Vignette, a maker of Web content management software, doesn’t fill any signifi-
cant holes in OpenText’s product line, since Open- Text already has Web content management software via RedDot, the result of an earlier acquisition.
Integration could be complicated, since OpenText’s products are built around .Net, C++, and Java, while Vignette runs on J2EE, notes CMS Watch analyst Kas Thomas. “Vignette only adds another layer to—it in no way reconciles—Open Text’s
crazy quilt of technologies,” Thomas writes. 451 Group’s Kathleen Reidy predicts con- flict over whether Vignette or RedDot becomes the Web content management line of choice.
With OpenText and Vi- gnette the last of the two major independent content management vendors—Au- tonomy acquired enterprise content management vendor Interwoven in March—the buy may be about bulking
up to compete with the likes of EMC, IBM, and Oracle.
OpenText sees a chance to sell its enterprise content management software to Vi- gnette’s customer base, which OpenText president and CEO John Shackleton calls “some of the world’s most powerful online brands.” But Vignette’s hardly on a roll; its first-quarter revenue was down 24% from a year ago.
—Andrew Conry-Murray ([email protected])
[QUICKTAKES] ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE
CONTENT MANAGEMENT
McDermott: SAP sensitive to current conditions[
HOW’S MY DRIVING? Truckers and limo drivers face new scrutiny now that the FleetMatics GPS Vehicle Track- ing Solution works with Google Maps API Premier. FleetMatics could track corporate vehicles in the past, but it now can put that data on Google Maps for easy display on internal and even partner Web sites, complete with speed, idle time, mileage, and start/stop times.
IBM PAYS FOR SWITCHES As Oracle plans to acquire Sun, IBM is doubling a program that gives free software and services to companies if they unplug their Sun servers. Under IBM’s Power Rewards migration program, customers are promised $8,000 of software or services for every Sun Sparc processor ditched in favor of IBM Power servers. It had been $4,000.
BYE-BYE, BORLAND Micro Focus is buying application life-cycle management vendor Borland for $75 million in cash.The deal would mark
the end of Borland, a Sili- con Valley company co- founded in 1983 by tech icon Philippe
Kahn, and whose products included the Quattro Pro spreadsheet. Micro Focus also is acquiring Compuware’s application-testing and quality- monitoring software, for $80 million in cash.
VIRTUAL SELF-SERVICE Vizioncore’s new vControl virtual machine management toolset lets end users provision virtual machines without IT help.Vizioncore takes a multi- hypervisor approach, letting users of VMware ESX Server, Cit- rix Systems XenServer, Micro- soft Hyper-V, and Sun’s Solaris Zones select applications, con- figure, and initiate a virtual machine of their own choice. Price: $399 per server socket.
In a move that lets it ex- pand its reach in building
and deploying Java software, SpringSource, the supplier of the Spring framework open source Java development platform, has acquired open source systems management company Hyperic.
Hyperic’s systems management software, Hyperic HQ, will help SpringSource deploy the code it produces, manage its operation, and add updates and modifica- tions, says CEO Rod John- son. “If you use SpringSource technology, we’re going to give you an amazingly simple way to manage your application’s life cycle,” he says.
Over the last year, Spring- Source has gone beyond supplying software for code development and moved into products to deploy and manage code, including the SpringSource dm Java application server and Spring- Source tc, an enterprise version of the Apache Tomcat
server for running Java apps. Hyperic also offers Hyperic
Operations IQ for collecting and reporting information on Web application performance
and conformance with service-level agreements.
SpringSource has wanted to bring Hyperic HQ Enter- prise systems management in-house because, for the last two years, it’s been in- corporating HQ management into its product line, Johnson says. “SpringSource is trying to create a unified story from development through application life-cycle management,” he says.
By moving from code development into middleware, SpringSource has become an unexpected challenger of better-established ways of deploying Java applications, including IBM WebSphere, Oracle’s WebLogic, and even Red Hat’s JBoss open source application server. Its stock in trade, however, remains producing easier-to-manage Java apps for Web sites.
Hyperic is SpringSource’s third acquisition of an open source company in 16 months, having bought Co- valent, which provided support around Apache projects, and GoToOne, supplier of a rapid development scripting language platform for Java called Groovy and Grails that’s similar to Ruby on Rails. SpringSource will have about 150 employees, and Hyperic CEO Javier Soltero becomes CTO of the company’s management products.
—Charles Babcock ([email protected])
SpringSource Gets Into Management
Got a cough and a fever? Worried it’s swine flu?
The spike in emergency room visits caused by the flu outbreak turned into a fast- turnaround software development project at the 400- bed El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, Calif.
El Camino uses Micro- soft’s Amalga integration platform to connect silos of transactional data from dis-
parate clinical applications. When the outbreak hit, its IT team built an application on Amalga to track ER patients with swine flu symp- toms—coughs and fevers above 100.7 degrees—to create a follow-up list of people well enough to go home but awaiting lab tests for swine flu, which take about 24 hours.
“Within three hours, we
had a new tracking system, troubleshot it, and trained a clinical manager in the ED how to use it,” says Dr. Mi- chael Gallagher, the hospital’s director of business intelligence and outcomes. The application also helps the hospital compile statis- tics it’s required to send three times a day to the county health department during the flu outbreak.
The good news: So far, no confirmed swine flu cases. —Marianne Kolbasuk McGee
([email protected])
[QUICKTAKES]
There’s perpetual talk about which Linux dis-
tribution has the best shot at gaining desktop market share. If you ask me, the best Linux will be “invisible Linux.”
No, I’m not talking about the fact that Linux is effectively invisible right now, with 1% market share if it’s lucky. Rather, if the open source operating system gains on the desktop, the word Linux won’t appear on any advertising, because it simply won’t matter. The focus will be on what the system can do for you, not the architecture or brand or faith in open source values.
Consider the most de- pendably overused contrast- ing example: Apple. Apple doesn’t trumpet how Mac OS X is a derivative of BSD blah blah free software yadda yadda, because the only people who care about such things are the ones who, well,
care about such things and will find out for themselves. It’s not a selling point for people interested in the work they can get done with a PC.
It’s why I roll my eyes and chuckle whenever I see a Linux distribution, or Linux itself, pushed with a “freedom to do what you want with your PC” canard. Most people are doing what they want with their PCs; they’re getting work done by running pro- grams, most of them on Win- dows. Touting something as “better” when it doesn’t even have a native client for World Of Warcraft (random example—you get the idea) is not an improvement to them.
So if there’s a successful Linux distribution for the mainstream—which is a “nice to have” for the Linux movement, not essential— it’ll be one where “Linux” isn’t the operative word.
—Serdar Yegulalp ([email protected])
[QUICKTAKES]
IBM is extending its influence in information management with a deal to acquire Exeros, a privately held developer of software that sifts through databases and re- trieves information more efficiently. Finan- cial terms weren’t disclosed.
Exeros’ technology will help customers deal with “the daunting challenge of turn- ing massive amounts of information into in- sights to guide their business,” says Ambuj Goyal,general manager of IBM’s information management unit.“Many are held back by
the complexity of corporate data sources.” A credit card company, for instance,
might use Exeros’ technology to consoli- date data from its customer-rewards pro- grams. The software can pull related data from multiple databases and offer a single master view.
IBM is building out its portfolio of software and services as it cuts its depend- ence on hardware. The company has announced or completed 16 acquisitions in the past 16 months, most for software that
helps businesses more efficiently store, share, and interpret data.
Most significantly, IBM acquired Cognos last year for about $5 billion, a move that thrust IBM into
the forefront of the business intelligence market.Now with Oracle building out its own stack of end-to-end solutions, most recently through an agreement to buy Sun Microsys- tems for $7.4 billion, some observers say IBM may counter with a move into the applications market. —Paul McDougall
([email protected])
FOLLOW-UP
Time to rethink enterprise content management and collaboration: informationweek.com/1215/approach.htm
24 May 11, 2009
Citrix’s new Dazzle storefront for the enterprise
will provide an iTunes-like interface that will let users serve themselves virtualized apps.
Is that what IT teams really want?
Citrix gets that there’s ten- sion between the control IT wants and the more free-spir- ited consumer download approach. “There’s an epic battle shaping up between consumer culture and inertia,” senior VP Wes Wasson says.
Yet Dazzle is hardly the Wild West. Citrix is rolling out its Merchandising Server, which lets IT teams prepare what apps to include in the Dazzle storefront, and Citrix Receiver, which is client software that provides end users with a virtualized app or desktop and runs on Win-
dows PCs, Apple Macin- toshes, and iPhones.
Dazzle visitors may browse selections or search based on an application name or type. Or they can choose apps from categories IT defines. They select an app by clicking on an icon under Windows or drag- ging it into a folder or dock on the Mac. Selections may even be organized into “playlists,” Wasson says.
Any app or desktop that can be virtualized under Cit- rix XenServer, XenApp, or XenDesktop can be loaded into the store. IT can restrict what’s available to groups, charge for use, create apps only for a certain time period, and restrict availability to members of a particular project. —Charles Babcock
([email protected])
Many vendors see cloud computing as the end-
game, with customers getting hooked on cloud-based applications and where data resides in perpetuity. Not Jive Software. Jive taps Amazon .com’s Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, to offer collaboration in the cloud, but its real goal is to give companies just enough of its software that they buy its on- premises version.
Jive Express is collaboration software that runs as a virtualized instance on Ama- zon’s EC2 platform. Jive Ex- press offers most of the
functions of Jive’s Social Business Software package, including wikis, document sharing, and bookmarks.
Jive uses the cloud offering as a starter drug for collaboration software, hoping it’s enough to get people hooked. Jive Express re-
quires a minimum commitment of 100 users, and caps the service at 500 users, at which point Jive starts pushing customers off the cloud, either to its on-premises software or to its own hosted offering.
One catch: Although Jive touts the ease with which customers can move out of the cloud, complications can ensue. For one, Jive Ex- press runs on the Postgres database. Companies that grow out of Express and want a different database will likely need to call on Jive’s professional services team to migrate data.
Also, if different departments or business units sign up for their own instances of Jive Express, there’s no easy way to meld those instances
into a single version. Service-level agreements
for Jive Express are set by Amazon EC2, not Jive, so companies have to make sure Amazon’s levels are sufficient.
The first three months of Jive Express are free. Jive then charges $3 per user per month. With the 100-user minimum requirement, that’s $300 per month after the free trial ends.
Jive Express makes it easy to ramp up a pilot and then walk away if it doesn’t work out. If it does work out, customers at least know what they’ll be getting in return for any integration hassles from migrating to the enterprise version.
—Andrew Conry-Murray ([email protected])
Jive Uses Amazon EC2 To Hook Customers
Mainframes aren’t going away, since they’re still the right
workhorse for jobs like high-volume, round-the-clock transaction processing. There’s even a bit of growth in the market.
But the biggest risk to mainframe adoption, says CA CEO John Swainson, “is the age of the people running them.”
That’s part of the reason CA has been spending development money to modernize its mainframe management software. It’s promising a multiyear initiative to introduce more languages and user interfaces to the mainframe, including Java and C++. Its first offering: browser-based installation and update software.
CA says it has seen 20% annual compounded growth in
MIPS (million instructions per second, a measure of mainframe workloads) since mainframe use bottomed out in 2000. CA’s mainframe revenue actually grew in the quarter ended Dec. 31.
However, the average age of workers maintaining mainframes is between 55 and 62, and new grads aren’t armed with the skills to pick up the slack. Even simple tasks often require complex scripts written in obscure com- mands, and many of the applications running on mainframes are written in decades-old Cobol code. In most cases, there’s no graphical interface.
That’s why the first release in what CA’s pitching as Mainframe 2.0 is a browser-based GUI toolkit written in Java and a Google
Web Toolkit that lets IT pros download and install mainframe software and informs them when updates are available. Forty-five of CA’s mainframe products will be supported by Mainframe Software Manager, with more to come.
CA also has simplified the installation model for 143 of its mainframe products and promises a deployment platform in 2010, followed by a configuration platform in 2011. These steps will help unify CA’s product line, which today is a mish- mash of acquired and homegrown products, many of which haven’t changed much in years and share few commonalities.
—J. Nicholas Hoover ([email protected])
CA Tries A Mainframe Makeover
A Cloud Of Your Own Are private clouds the future of computing? Find out at
informationweek.com/alert/private
informationweekreports.com
DIG DEEPER
Mainframes still have several IT trends on their side. Projects to move work to distributed servers have stalled because of cost cutting, and shifts to virtualization and energy efficiency echo long-held benefits of the mainframe.
bottom line
informationweek.com28 May 11, 2009
With $20 billion of federal stimulus funds available for deploying electronic medical record systems, hospitals and doctors’ offices are sure to pick up the pace. Implementing these systems will be difficult enough; keeping them performing to the satisfaction of clinicians may prove even harder.
E-medical record systems require doctors and nurses to make changes to patient- care workflows, and that alone can be a tough sell. If system performance problems prevent clinicians from accessing patient data or or- dering drugs and tests in a timely way, users will aban- don the systems.
“They’ll revolt,” says Gart- ner analyst Barry Runyon, who deployed clinical systems when he was CTO at University Medical Center in Tucson, Ariz.
For this reason, performance-monitoring tools from IBM, BMC, CA, Compuware, Hewlett-Packard, and other vendors are playing a more prominent role for health care CIOs.
At Partners HealthCare, a Boston-area integrated health care system that operates hospitals such as Brigham & Women’s and Massachusetts General, systems management tools give the IT team “a fine level of granularity,”
says CTO Steve Flammini. That matters because the service requirements of primary-care doctors and nurses are different from those of researchers and office staff, he says.
Partners uses Compu- ware’s Vantage to “detect hot spots” before users see performance problems, Flam- mini says. Vantage integrates application performance management, business service management, and end- user “experience” monitoring. The tools can indicate where performance problems occur and whether they’re with a particular server or software program, so they can be addressed before users report trouble.
Flammini says Partners
uses the Compuware tools to support service-level agreements in areas such as system availability and re- sponsiveness for drug or- ders, patient data access, and the practice scheduling software used by physicians.
Monitoring clinical system performance has been particularly helpful when Partners rolls out new software releases or functionality, since IT staff can quickly
identify any deviations in service levels, allowing the IT team to isolate problems before users experience them, Flammini says.
Proactive Approach Detroit Medical Center
uses Vantage to monitor performance across 300 clinical applications, 600 servers,
and other IT infrastructure, says CIO Mike LeRoy. “In the old days, IT was reactive. I’d wait for the call” from users reporting problems, he says. “Now we have tools to stay two steps ahead.”
Detroit Medical Center regularly runs simulated application transactions to monitor how clinical systems are running, LeRoy says. IT support staff over- seeing the systems receive
automatic alerts, including e-mails and pages, when Vantage detects a problem.
The medical center began using Vantage a few years ago to support an initiative to promote 29-minute emergency department services. It’s not uncommon for patients elsewhere to wait for hours to be treated by busy emergency room staff, and Detroit Medical Center wanted to set itself apart. Keeping its emergency department’s promise to patients depends on IT running smoothly, LeRoy says.
In the past, certain system problems—say, radiologists having difficulty viewing digitized images—could take hours or days to pin- point and resolve. With proactive monitoring, LeRoy says, such problems typi- cally can be addressed within an hour or minutes. —Marianne Kolbasuk McGee
([email protected])
[QUICKTAKES]
Nurse with Detroit Medical’s Hutzel Hospital checks emergency records.
informationweek.com May 11, 2009 31
Microsoft needs as many IT eyes as possible on the near-final version
of Windows 7 it’s just released. More user testing, done earlier, is its bet to prevent a repeat of the mistakes it made with Vista, from application incompati- bility to hardware driver failures.
The vendor faces a challenge con- vincing IT shops that the OS will be enterprise-ready at release, since many
companies are still smarting from early problems with Vista.
One early tester, the Bright Group, a midsize Australian electronics manufacturing company, likes the quicker re- boot and wake-up times, improved user interface, and more usable taskbar, says Erdal Ozkaya, a consultant to Bright Group. Employees also like a search feature that highlights instances of the words and phrases being searched within found documents and the ability to unlock Windows gadgets from the side of the screen.
Another early tester is Logikworx, a small managed-IT services company that has 12 employees running Win- dows 7 as their full-time system. Logik- worx has to be an early adopter to ad- vise clients on Microsoft’s OS, but it’s also seeing customer interest.
The company has signed on 10 small businesses with at most 30 PCs to move to Windows 7 the day it’s released, says managing partner John Obeto. These upgrades will be made
easier, though, because the companies are already on Vista, which has the same hardware requirements as Win- dows 7. Many companies balked at the hardware upgrades needed for Vista.
Obeto isn’t seeing the device coverage and app-compatibility problems that plagued Vista. “I’m able to install Windows 7 and not have a problem with it, even with some pretty old hardware,” he says.
Other areas of improvement include more relevant search results and fewer security prompts. Windows 7 also allows automatic VPN connection with Direct Access and has a Windows XP Mode to run older apps.
Windows 7 is feature-complete, and the only expected code changes will be bug fixes, unless the European Union requires others. Microsoft says 99% of the drivers available for Windows Vista SP1 are available for Windows 7, and 94% of PCs running Windows 7 Beta have had no driver errors upon installation. Dri- ver issues were a big problem with Vista.
Windows 7 will face plenty of tough critics in the testing leading up to its release. Mikko H. Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure, for example, notes in a recent blog post that Windows Explorer, the operating system’s file management application, still has a feature that allows virus writers to disguise exe- cutable files as something more innocu- ous, such as text files. The feature has been around since the Windows NT era.
At the same time, Microsoft deserves credit for hardening Windows 7 against another attack vector—automatic exe- cution of files on removable media. It changed Windows AutoPlay so it only automatically runs applications on CD/DVD players, thus preventing the propagation of malware like the Con- ficker worm through USB thumb drives. —J. Nicholas Hoover
([email protected]) and Thomas Claburn
Trying again with Windows 7[
[QUICKTAKES]
[CLOUD STORAGE]
D isk storage is already one of the data center’s biggest ex-
penses, the cost of finished arrays keeps rising, and IDC pre-
dicts that companies’ storage infrastructures will grow 300%
by the end of the decade. Amid this backdrop, there’s growing
concern that businesses will drown in the expense of storing data.
Enter cloud storage—network-accessible storage infrastructure that
evangelists promise will prevent the apocalyptic scenario envisioned
above by IDC in its “Exploding Data Universe” report (sponsored by
EMC). Proffering largely untested claims about huge capacity cost re-
ductions, the elimination of labor required for storage administration
and maintenance, and just-in-time provisioning of capacity on a pen-
nies-per-terabyte basis, cloud storage providers are getting the atten-
tion of businesses large and small.
To storage industry veterans, cloud storage doesn’t feel like a brand-
Storage-as-a-service offerings are touted as flexible alternatives to on-premises systems. We put those claims to the test.
By Jon Toigo
Storage In The Cloud Storage In The Cloud
new model. The core concepts are derivative of service bureau computing paradigms advanced by IBM and others in the 1970s, of Sun Microsystems’ “the network is the computer,” and of application service providers and storage service providers of the 1990s.
What’s different this time? The economy, of course. With on-premises storage costs already high and growing in many IT departments, interest in alternatives is strong. Storage-as-a-service vendors say they can lower costs by taking on the burden of storage management and insulating customers from related costs like hardware upgrades. If cloud providers can capture economies of scale by using the same pool of storage capacity to meet the needs of many customers and pass along the cost savings, the price of spindle capacity should be well below what companies would otherwise pay for their own storage.
The earlier-generation application and storage service providers made a similar argument, but they ran into problems that contributed to their un- doing, including the networking costs of connecting users and applications, and customer concerns over sharing infrastructure with other companies. Once customers started demanding that their services be provided using physically separate components, ASPs and SSPs were forced to violate their own economies of scale by deploying infrastructure on a one-off basis for each customer.
Cloud storage vendors say they’ve gotten past those obstacles. Network connectivity is faster, cheaper, and more secure, and virtualization technology is being used in corporate data centers to provide segregated storage environments, minimizing concerns over data infection and demands for dedicated infrastructure.
Cloud storage folk point to the high cost of storing data that’s retained for
[CLOUD STORAGE]
Z etta’s response to InformationWeek’s request for information—done to meet the requirements of DIY Marketing, our hypothetical company— began with a discussion of its platform, comprising a proprietary file system used across off-the-shelf, scalable commodity storage gear. Upon ingestion, customer data is decomposed into chunks that are written across disks using a redundant array of independent nodes scheme
called RAIN6 N+3. Once written, data is accessed via a range of industry-standard methods, in-
cluding iSCSI,WebDav, FTP, NFS, and CIFS. Zetta’s description emphasizes that this is an infinite storage array in the cloud, treated just like any storage box you might have on the floor in your own data center.
Zetta claims that customers realize a three-year total cost of ownership advan- tage of three to four times that of on-premises storage. Risk is mitigated by a robust data-protection scheme and encryption of all data on disk.
Zetta hosts data in a multitenant environment and provides on-demand capacity allocation without capacity preplanning and a lot of provisioning effort. The company argues that this distinguishes it from traditional outsourcing and storage service provisioning models.
Access security can be provided by routing all external access requests through a VPN to the company premises, or by making those requests directly to Zetta’s facilities. Third-party applications are required for concurrent file access and for such functions as archiving. At present, Zetta doesn’t support data deduplication.
Zetta says it has multiple geographically dispersed data centers, but it doesn’t disclose their locations. Monthly and annual contracts are available, with prices starting at about 25 cents per gigabyte per month.
Despite being a startup, Zetta’s response was comprehensive. Many of its claims remain to be demonstrated, but it’s clear Zetta is making a sincere effort to address business customer requirements. —Jon Toigo
Comprehensive Pitch From A Cloud Startup
ZETTA
business or compliance reasons, yet rarely re-referenced by the organization. This data, they say, is ideal for cloud- based storage, and doing so will free up the spindles that companies now use for primary or live data. This argument has some merit and will likely become a mantra: the cloud as a low-cost reposi- tory for compliance and archive data.
Delivering such services, however,
is again a two-edged sword for cloud providers. To address governance rules, including privacy laws, that ap- ply in different geographies will probably require cloud storage companies to have multiple data centers with different operating procedures, audit standards, and certifications. This is no small issue and may quickly determine a pecking order in the uni-
PLUG INTO THE CLOUD: For more on the storage-as-a-service trend, visit PlugIntoTheCloud.com
verse of cloud storage services. To better understand the cloud stor-
age options available to businesses, In- formationWeek issued a request for information and invited all storage-as- a-service vendors to participate. We did so under the auspices of a hypothetical midsize company called DIY Marketing Services, with nearly 100 TB of data in its storage infrastructure and volume growing quickly.
Five vendors—Caringo, IBM, Iron Mountain Digital, Nirvanix, and Zetta—participated, and our analysis of their proposed solutions is included in this report. The RFI can be down- loaded in its entirety at information week.com/1230/rfi_cloud.htm.
Not All The Same Cloud storage vendors come in dif-
ferent stripes. We divide them into four categories: pure-play companies focused on providing external storage services; generalists with broader cloud
computing offerings of which storage is only part; specialty providers that offer a discrete set of services, such as re- mote storage for disaster recovery; and internal cloud vendors that sell platforms for cloud storage inside corporate data centers.
For all of the purported economic advantages of cloud storage and the improvements over earlier-generation services, some hurdles still remain. In April, McKinsey & Co. re- ported that, based on its analysis, cloud computing in general is more expensive than on-premises comput-
ing in some usage scenarios. McKinsey’s findings have merit, and
they extend to cloud storage. The issues that make storage costly aren’t directly addressed by the cloud model. From a cost of ownership perspective, the challenges of managing storage infrastructure are a key cost driver. Most storage array vendors differentiate their products with value-added software, embedding features on proprietary array controllers. A byproduct of that re- ality is that it makes storage management more difficult, especially when the infrastructure is heterogeneous.
Cloud providers may shield customers from the hassles of storage management, but the hassles remain. Most say that cloud storage management is a still-evolving story and one that they currently solve through the deployment of homogenous arrays that can be managed more simply using the selected vendor’s tools.
This theme has helped define a sec-
[CLOUD STORAGE]
D IY Marketing’s request for information received a response from IBM Business Continuity and Recovery Services that, while it failed to address the broad range of services sought, provides insight into a fast- growing subclass of cloud storage services: services related to data protection.
The company proposed collecting important data from DIY via agents installed on servers or appliances located in each DIY location. The data collected is transported over secure networking interconnects and placed onto a multitenant pooled storage infrastructure, with the value-add of hashing the data using content-addressable storage technology that would ensure its integrity, discoverability, and manageability over time.
In addition to backing up and ensuring the recoverability of data assets, IBM also suggested that the service could be leveraged as a long-term archive. Data would be stored to SATA disk in a deduplicated state, the latter optimizing the transfer of data across WANs. Individual or collective data restoration by the customer can be accomplished in a num-
ber of ways. IBM touted a multiple data center footprint with resiliency centers on several continents.
Provisioning is on-demand via a Web interface, and customers are billed for capacity used rather than allocated. IBM said pricing wasn’t available until its sales team had the op- portunity to meet with DIY and document its requirements based on an assessment of its current environment and data protection practices.
Service-level agreements in this case were linked to recovery time and recovery point objectives, establishing that this is primarily a cloud-based data protection solution. The response didn’t reference any sort of cloud standards or mention the Open Cloud Manifesto, which IBM as a company supports.
In the final analysis, this wasn’t a comprehensive response to DIY requirements, nor did it provide more than brochure- level information about IBM’s services. It introduced some confusion by the discussion of archiving, which seems to mean the same thing as backup in this context, but they’re not the same. —Jon Toigo
Data Backup As A Subset Of Cloud Storage IBM
Private Clouds Wary of the risks of public cloud services, some companies are deploying cloud-like
environments internally. Download this story at informationweek.com/alert/privatecloud
See all our InformationWeek Reports at informationweekreports.com
DIG DEEPER
[CLOUD STORAGE]
ond branch of the emerging market—technology for building internal storage clouds, offered by vendors such as ParaScale and Bycast. Inter- nal cloud advocates assert that the security issues associated with storage across a wide area network haven’t been mitigated as conclusively as external cloud service providers would like us to believe.
A Lack Of Standards What’s missing from the cloud story,
whether external or internal, are standards. Most cloud storage providers present access to storage infrastructure via proprietary application programming interfaces.
Web services could be harnessed to facilitate the monitoring of resource status, including workload, performance metrics, availability, and capacity, so that policies could be crafted to allocate resources (whether physical, virtual, or cloud-based) to the right I/O. Such an open standards-based resource provisioning model has been embraced by Xiotech and a few other vendors and is on the drawing boards in many product development shops. However, no cloud services companies, including cloud storage startups, have thus far announced support for the strategy.
Asked about standards, most cloud storage providers reference standard certifications such as ISO or various security standards or the name-brand vendor whose storage gear is being used in their infrastructure. These may be standards of a sort, but they’re not the kind of standards that promise to become as ubiquitous as TCP/IP, for example.
The absence of real standards for cloud computing generally, and cloud storage specifically, frames the key question that many prospective customers need to ask themselves before embracing the trend: How will I be any better off with clouds over the next few years than I would be from implementing a homegrown strategy of infra-
N irvanix, an up-and-comer in cloud storage, provides all the services sought in DIY Marketing’s request for information. Nirvanix provides a multitenant storage platform comprised of commodity hardware, augmented by its own object-oriented file system for hosting active file and archival data. Upon ingestion, file data is copied between nodes and, if desired, among three Nirvanix data centers within the United States or data cen-
ters in Japan or Germany. Access can be made via NFS, FTP, or by means of a new SOAP/REST-over-
HTTP/HTTPS API. Nirvanix provisions storage “proactively,” and it insists that its business customers don’t experience a lag between capacity demand and provisioning.
Global namespace and replication capabilities make Nirvanix an easy fit with DIY’s geographically dispersed file sharing and project team collaboration requirements. Secure Sockets Layer connections to pre-configured Internet URLs provide an easy means for accessing stored data.
Nirvanix recommends that DIY leverage a four-node configuration that would cost about 94 cents per gigabyte per month.There are charges for uploading data ($1.26 per gigabyte per month) and for downloading data (18 cents per gigabyte per month) for this configuration. The vendor offers a service level expressed as 99.9% uptime per month and says that failure to meet its SLA will result in credits on the customer’s next service bill.
The well-developed business case submitted in response to our RFI reflects the experience of Nirvanix’s management team, some of whom trace their careers back to the application service provider era, where they seem to have learned some vital business lessons. —Jon Toigo
Geographic Diversity Lends Oomph To SLA
NIRVANIX
structure right-sizing, improved infrastructure management, and intelligent data management?
The fact is that cloud storage appeals to many companies for the simple reason of cost savings. If vendors can deliver even a percentage of the cost re- ductions they promise, and if you can feel comfortable that your data will be secure and well managed, then the strategy could be a win-win.
Service-level agreements are very important and may determine the out- come of the cloud experience. An SLA is the vendor’s promise regarding the availability and performance of a solution. There’s a tendency to set the bar too high when entering into a new
outsourcing arrangement, to hold vendors to service levels that would be impossible to deliver under the best of circumstances and regardless of price. Sometimes vendors sign off on impossible-to-meet SLAs just to get the business. When expectations are set too high, however, there’s a tendency for the arrangement to sour within a year or two, as the record of traditional outsourcing shows. A clear understanding of both requirements and measurement metrics is important.
Methods for signing up for a cloud service vary from vendor to vendor, as do contract lengths. While some vendors provide a stock SLA and contract, and a few permit sign-up on the Web,
most want to meet with a potential client directly to assess the current sit- uation and to arrive at a service offering that’s tailored to its needs. In response to our mock request for information, several respondents pre- ferred to go this route.
Questions In Need Of Answers Preliminary issues to resolve in
moving to cloud storage are common- sensical. The questions that IT pros should ask as they move in this direc- tion include:
>> How will data be loaded initially into the service provider’s platform?
>> What security is provided to prevent data access by unauthorized individuals within the provider shop?
>> How much bandwidth will be required to meet requirements for data access?
>> What protection is afforded your data from disasters affecting the vendor’s environment? If data is mirrored between sites, how is this accomplished and how is the mirroring confirmed?
>> How will service levels be moni- tored and measured?
>> How will service-level shortfalls be remediated?
>> Can the vendor exclude data from processes you don’t want to touch your electronic information (for example, deduplication for data that is required to remain in a full and un- altered state by specific regulations)?
>> How will data be returned to you if the vendor’s business fails?
No one, especially the vendor, much likes to consider the final question, but customer experience with the application and storage service providers of the late 1990s makes it essential to ask. The simple fact is that many vendors are appearing in the cloud computing market, which in the best of times probably can’t sustain more than a handful of players. That means that some vendors ultimately will shutter operations, so IT departments that give cloud storage a try should have an exit strategy just in case.
In the InformationWeek request for
information, our hypothetical company, DIY Marketing, was a composite of many companies we’ve interviewed that are looking into cloud storage. The structure of the RFI was intended to capture the current thinking and practices of vendors working in this area. Of the companies that responded to InformationWeek’s request for information, three—Iron Moun- tain Digital, Nirvanix, and Zetta—are cloud storage pure plays, offering services for hosting and managing DIY’s data. One, IBM, offers a set of discrete services for data protection. The other, Caringo, offers software for creating well-managed storage infrastructure internally, creating a so- called internal storage cloud.
Invited, but notably absent from the list of respondents to the request for information, were Amazon.com and EMC. Also not responding were cham- pions of internal cloud technologies, ParaScale and Bycast. Most of these companies responded that they were unable to meet the time frames for pro-
[CLOUD STORAGE]
A venerable name in data assets storage and preservation, Iron Mountain has been moving into digital services, beginning with electronic vaulting of backups. Iron Mountain’s proposal to our request for information provides insight into its expansion into cloud services with Virtual File Store.
VFS requires the deployment of a server that “looks like” network-attached storage in each of DIY Marketing’s facilities, which in turn provides a client-side connection to Iron Moun- tain data centers where customer data gets hosted. The vendor, however, didn’t disclose the number of data centers it operates or their locations. And it provided scant details on the storage architecture within its data centers, saying only that it uses “industry-standard hardware.”
The VFS server integrates with Microsoft’s Active Directory and avails itself of Microsoft file system security. All data is en- crypted in transport to and from Iron Mountain and while stored on disk at its facilities. All services, from thin provision-
ing to data deduplication, are supported by Iron Mountain’s offering, but there’s no indication whether these services are provided (or excluded from use) at the customer’s request or used as a function of the underlying storage infrastructure employed.
The proposal provides no information about pricing except to say that it’s based on “the specific number of locations and the amount of data that is being protected with the Virtual File Store solution.” Iron Mountain’s service is billed monthly, but there’s no indication in its response to the RFI of how much its storage as a service would cost compared with the alternative of on-premises storage.
Despite an emphasis on security, which includes routine penetration testing, there’s little in Iron Mountain’s proposal to suggest that there’s much “cloudiness” in its approach. With an on-premises appliance required, it’s a straightforward offer to host backups and other rarely accessed files using conven- tional storage methods. —Jon Toigo
From On-Premises Servers Into The Cloud IRON MOUNTAIN
viding a thorough response to our query owing to resource constraints.
In reviewing the RFI responses submitted, and from interviews with respondents to the RFI and other players in the market, my takeaways are mixed.
First, the positives. I was impressed that many of the vendors interviewed seem to have learned some important lessons from the application and storage service provider meltdown of the past. Gone is the willingness to build one-off infrastructure for every customer or to field name-brand gear when generic disk arrays will do just as well. This change in attitude might just make the difference between survival of a few of these providers, on the one hand, and a fairly rapid death knell for the en- tire cloud storage model, on the other.
I was also impressed by the state- ments of some vendors that cloud storage really is optimized for secondary storage, archive, and backups, where retrieval latencies (paralleling the
World Wide Wait to which we all have become accustomed) play less of a role than they do in transaction-oriented primary storage apps. Not one vendor with whom I spoke seemed to be over- selling its capabilities.
Surprisingly, none of the vendors I chatted with was inclined to join cloud storage at the hip with x86 server virtualization. There were no claims that cloud storage would connect any more efficiently with VMware software than physical storage, or that cloud storage would improve the resource utilization inefficiency we already live with in both physical server-to-storage and virtual server-to-storage connection paradigms. That was a relief given the marketecture that inundates storage- savvy IT people from the pro-x86 virtualization crowd.
What Are Clouds, Anyway? What I continued to find a bit disturb-
ing was the lack of a refined definition of what exactly cloud storage (or cloud any-
thing) is. Is it middleware? Is it simply a recasting of the old storage-on-demand services? Without a strong Web services standards hook, I fail to see what I can do with cloud storage that I can’t do internally with storage virtualization software like DataCore’s complemented with CA XOsoft for data replication across a WAN and Virtual Instruments for en- hanced visibility and management of my Fibre Channel fabric.
I crossed swords with a few internal storage cloud vendors on this point. I would argue that true cloud storage platforms must be able to support multitenancy and SLAs, but not all vendors who adopt the cloud moniker do that.
Also, I was dismayed by an almost myopic focus either on cheap storage or on reduced risk among the vendors I interviewed and the RFI responses we received. The cheap storage play may be valid, but cost isn’t the only component of business value; simi- larly, backing your mission-critical
[CLOUD STORAGE]
SERVICE-LEVEL AGREEMENT
Service (S3) available 99.9% of the time during monthly billing cycle; credits of 10% to 25% for failing to meet commitment
Service agreement specifies in detail how it provisions service, secures data, and transmits data on request; implementation and storage fees; and optional services
Service available 99.9% of the time during monthly billing cycle; if it fails to meet minimum service level, customers are eli- gible to receive a service credit
Offers guaranteed levels of service availability, service performance, and data integrity/protection on a per-customer basis; 100% data integrity guaranteed for customers with replicated solution
PRICING
12 to 15 cents per gigabyte, additional charges for data transfers and data requests
Based on the number of locations, amount of data protected
25 to 94 cents per gigabyte per month, plus upload and download costs; discounts based on storage commitment and contract length
Monthly pricing calculated as average daily peak utilization, starting at 25 cents per gigabyte, plus charges for bandwidth consumed (usually less than 20% of cost)
DATA CENTERS
Not disclosed
May 11, 2009 45
C aringo is positioning its content-addressable storage software as a founda- tion for internal storage clouds. Its products, especially CAStor, are readily deployed on commodity storage and x86 server gear and bring a new level of granularity to the management, preservation, and protection of data that recommends it for consideration with or without the “cloud storage”marketing rhetoric.
CAStor was developed by the same team that developed the FilePool controller and software later purchased by EMC and implemented as a product called Cen- tera. The developers later reengineered their technology, resolving several nag- ging problems, and created a hardware-agnostic version that could be leveraged to gain the advantages of Centera but without the huge price tag.
CAStor handily facilitates DIY Marketing’s needs for data storage, protection, and preservation/archive. Used in conjunction with collaboration products such as Microsoft SharePoint, Caringo argues that DIY’s project-centric data sharing and collaboration needs also can be met.
Caringo’s solution doesn’t provide DIY Marketing with an alternative to rolling its own storage; in short, this isn’t really storage as a service. But it does empower DIY to buy much-less-expensive gear and to provide the data management capabilities it’s seeking without the price tag of a name-brand box.
Pricing wasn’t disclosed, but licenses are provided on a capacity basis, with additional capacity licenses available for purchase and download from the company’s Web site. —Jon Toigo
Storage As A Service Inside The Firewall
CARINGO
data to a service provider (or doing any replication at all for data protection) may lessen risk of a cataclysmic interruption of your business, but this alone isn’t a comprehensive business case for technology.
Harvard Business Review has a pen- chant for triangles, using them to ex- plain just about everything. In the case of business value, the triangle is bounded by cost containment, risk re- duction, and top-line growth (an amalgam of improved user productivity, greater nimbleness, improved information support for decision making, and ability to adapt to changing markets). As many IT practitioners have discovered, you had better have a story to tell in each category or your initiative is unlikely to get funding.
The same applies to constructing a compelling business value case for cloud storage: It must tell a persuasive story in all three categories, or DIY is probably not going to buy into it. Our interest in understanding the core business value case was incorporated into the RFI, but only one respondent addressed it.
Until a business value case is fully articulated, funding of cloud storage initiatives will be hard to come by. As the old saw goes, “No bucks, no Buck Rogers.”
Jon Toigo is CEO of storage consultancy Toigo Partners International, founder and chairman of the Data Management Institute, and author of 13 books. Write to us at [email protected].
May 11, 2009 51
I f our InformationWeek Analytics State of Open Source survey of 557 business technology pros proves anything, it’s that those charged with se-
lecting applications to meet evolving business needs have more options than ever. But has the overabundance of commercial, open source, and hybrid software choices really made our lives easier, or just added more complexity to an already lengthy evaluation and buying process—especially on the desktop, where years of employee resistance has made it an expensive commercial world?
We say, vive la différence. Throw software as a service and cloud offerings into the mix, and let the competi- tion begin.
If there’s an upside to a down economy, it’s that business leaders who once may have dismissed open source software out of hand are likely willing to take a second look. What they’ll find is that overall, it’s less expensive than rival software models over the long term. And an in-house deployment of desktop open source software, while perhaps not simple, can lessen the risk of an undercapitalized SaaS vendor going south and taking your data with it.
IT pros get all that. Total cost of ownership for open source software is the top driver for the 557 respondents to our survey. Of course, closed source advocates argue that TCO doesn’t always account for the “soft” costs inherent in supporting open source software, and in fact, this is the single largest drag on open source adoption in our poll.
When we zero in on desktop open
source software, the picture gets more interesting. “End-user productivity is a key driver in the decision,” one IT director told us. “They know [Microsoft] Office and Adobe Photoshop, so they get Word and Photoshop. But anything that they don’t know or touch is fair game for open source alternatives.”
Real Savings The fact is, open source software like
OpenOffice.org is one area where companies can save real money. “From our perspective—both from speaking with organizations that have made the move and from having gone through sacred- cow change processes like this—it’s not so much a question of whether organizations should use free office-suite software, but rather how much to use and when,” says Jonathan Feldman, IT director for the city of Asheville, N.C. and an InformationWeek Analytics contribu-
tor. “When you consider the cost of the incumbent Microsoft software—a cou- ple of hundred dollars per license—and multiply that by hundreds or thousands of licenses, it becomes clear it’s not a matter of justifying the switch, but rather explaining the additional expense of keeping Microsoft Office around.”
Feldman says the fiscal rationale for switching becomes even clearer when you consider that many users of this expensive software need only basic functions. Open source alternatives, including OpenOffice, are viable and much less costly.
A technology director for a Min- nesota public school district agrees. “It’s coming slowly, but it’s coming,” he says. “As more stuff goes on the Web, there is less reason for the desktop apps needed by Windows. Most of the basic apps are available in open source. However, there is a lot of iner-
WHAT’S YOUR VIEW ON OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE FOR ENTERPRISE DESKTOPS?
Data: InformationWeek Analytics State of Open Source Survey of 557 business technology professionals using open source software
53%
Some apps will become open source eventually
12%
23%
4%
8%
We’re open to the idea, but adoption depends on future of open source support
We’ll never deploy open source software to the desktop
Don’t know
Open Source Chart7
OPEN SOURCE INROADS
Desktops, The Final Frontier Open source software is entrenched in enterprise data centers. Now what?
[STATE OF OPEN SOURCE]
Get the full-length Analytics Report at: opensource.informationweek.com
A N A LY T I C S B R I E F
informationweek.com
A N A LY T I C S B R I E F [STATE OF OPEN SOURCE]
tia toward Windows to overcome.” Indeed. End users resist change, and
as a result open source software hasn’t made the significant inroads onto enterprise desktops one might expect, though it does boast a respectable following among our poll respondents. Despite support worries, the majority, 54%, say they do use open source on the desktop, with the most popular apps being OpenOffice and the Firefox browser. For both of these, support is readily available, thanks to large user communities.
As for open source desktop operating systems, we saw growth in use of Linux in 2008 primarily among developers. But as this group enhances desktop Linux variants and contributes that code back to the community, projects like Ubuntu become more viable alternatives for the enterprise.
On the support front, while 18% of poll respondents purchase support from their open source vendors, most depend on internal resources. Few end users will be able to diagnose and repair even mi- nor issues in open source desktop software, and even fewer will be able to de- code the highly technical forums and wikis that comprise the support commu-
nity, so competent in-house IT resources are a requirement for any organization using open source on the desktop.
Take It Slow Rule No. 1 when deploying any open
source desktop application is to take it slow. Roll it out, but let employees keep their closed source apps at hand for a length of time, in case of emergency. Gradually disabling features in the closed source app while enabling features in the open source software will move adoption along. Most productivity apps mimic the familiar Office structure, but for open source with a com- pletely new interface, invest in training. Otherwise, you’ll waste expensive help desk capacity.
When considering newer and more specialized open source end-user apps, realize that they may not have the level of support we enjoy for established apps like OpenOffice or Firefox. They may have a much smaller user base, fewer contributors, or simply be very complex. In such cases, open source desktop application support should be implemented in the same way you’d support a new piece of closed source
software. Having IT use the same apps as the end users they support is a must.
Still, no matter how well planned your move, unfamiliar user interfaces, quirky behavior, and platform issues can challenge even the most experi- enced IT staff. For example, many PHP applications run very well on open source operating systems but are difficult if not wholly unusable on Windows Server. Take the open source Sugar- CRM, which was very slow on Win- dows until the community stepped up to provide better testing and support.
Given this, IT may do fine supporting server-based open source software that’s running on an open operating system but stumble when it’s running on a closed source desktop operating system such as Windows.
Our take here: As more new net- books and other PCs come with the op- tion to have Ubuntu Linux installed, and given the rave reviews that Ubuntu is receiving when put against Windows Vista, we expect to see more Linux desktops in the next few years. In the vanguard of this movement are national and local governments worldwide as well as nonprofits—organizations that need to exercise extreme budget control. A Canadian nonprofit association that promotes use of free software, for example, filed a motion before the Que- bec Superior Court over the $25 million the government spent on proprietary software from February to June 2008.
As tax revenue shrinks, we expect this trend to continue.
If you can swing it, now may be the time for intrepid organizations to snatch up high-quality IT talent, move to open source software, and reap the benefits of lower TCO for years to come.
Michael A. Davis is the CEO of Savid Technologies, a technology and security consulting firm based in Chicago. Write to us at [email protected].
WHAT’S THE TOTAL COST OF OWNERSHIP OF OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE OVER TWO YEARS?
Data: InformationWeek Analytics State of Open Source Survey of 557 business technology professionals using open source software
48%
7%
32%
10%
More expensive than some commercial
alternatives 3%
[INTERNET EVOLUTION]
the Recovery.gov site to see how that
pledge plays out in the real world.
By Mary Hayes Weier
resident Obama has made Internet-enabled government trans-
parency a cornerstone of his administration, but there hasn’t been much talk
about the information technology needed to pull it off. Well, the time has
come. The White House’s vision for transparency is clouded with numerous
technological hurdles, and agencies right now are making decisions that will
determine whether this effort makes government more open or becomes an-
other costly federal IT blunder.
The feds have entered the big leagues of data complexity with the February
launch of Recovery.gov, the Web site that promises to let citizens track most of
the $787 billion in econom

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