If you aren't happy with scheduling your Tweets and analyzing the sentiment of your social networking accounts, a new service from Gremln.com is available today that might be a better alternative. The company has been part of the St. Louis-based Capital Innovators startup accelerator/incubator program that we wrote about yesterday.

Sponsor

Like Hootsuite, you can schedule your tweets in advance and the free service allows you to access five different social media accounts across Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. You can schedule up to five messages per hour for the free service. There are numerous charts and graphs to show you various statistics, such as the number of LinkedIn posts per day as you can see below:

Gremln has lots more to it than just stats, though. It works with Brev.is or Bit.ly to shorten and track your URLs in your Tweets, you can add RSS feeds to your dashboard, and it even has a UI that looks a lot like Hootsuite, if you don't want to leave that behind.

There are various paid plans that start at $6 a month and expand the number of Tweets per hour scheduled, the number of saved report templates, and that add the ability to include Web analytics so you can track the results of your social networking campaigns to see if they actually resulted in increased Web traffic. And there are ways for work teams to share and jointly manage their accounts, something that Hootsuite isn't good at. If you are obsessive about your Klout score, you can link to your account and watch it ebb and flow as the company tweaks its algorithms too.

You can sign up here on the Gremln site and try it out.

Discuss

On Tuesday, we introduced you to CA Technologies' Private Cloud Accelerator for Vblock platforms, and if you're a frequent reader of ReadWriteWeb, you might still be wondering, "What's a Vblock platform?" It's an emerging contender in the out-of-the-box, full-service cloud server category from a company called VCE.

And if you're wondering how a relatively unknown company goes up against the likes of HP, Oracle, and IBM, the answer is by integrating hardware and software from specialists in their respective fields. Consequently, compute power and networking switches comes by way of Cisco UCS, storage capacity is supplied by EMC Symmetrix, and the virtualization layer is supplied by VMware. Yesterday, by way of a new strategic alliance, the VCE convoy added BMC Software's management software to this illustrious list.

Sponsor

"BMC is always focused on business service management - the management of services that sit above the infrastructure layer," explains Ken Berryman, BMC's senior vice president of strategy and corporate development. "We have a best-in-class set of solutions to do that, from orchestration through active management of operations. So when you think about what's really required to have a successful cloud project, it's not just enough to have the infrastructure block - the Vblock, which VCE produces. It's also mandatory to have the right level of management that fits above it, not only to take care of initial provisioning of whatever is operating in the data center, but to manage that over time."

The first stage of BMC's alliance with VCE, Berryman tells us, will see integration of VCE's existing infrastructure manager with BMC's Cloud Lifecycle Management, which includes automated provisioning of resources in scalable, virtualized "network zones." Imagine simpler, virtual networks where all the physical resources are pooled together, complete with virtual firewalls and load balancers.

From there, the two companies plan to implement BMC's ProactiveNet Performance Management Suite, which Berryman describes as "a set of capabilities that allow you to predict future problems, solve them before they occur, and proactively respond to operations issues." Next will come Atrium Orchestrator, which utilizes ITIL principles for change management in implementing workflows within the Vblock, enabling end-to-end control of virtual environments.

"That's the initial set of integrations," says Berryman. "Over time, we would expect more across the full portfolio of business service management solutions... That roadmap is something we will continue to expand, in response to direct customer demand. Certainly, we are able today to provide integrations across a broader set of the portfolio on a custom basis. But what we are attempting to do here is have a very standard, configured, out-of-the-box Vblock with the BMC solutions made for it, so it's easy to set up, deploy, operate, and manage over time your private or hybrid cloud."

Discuss

"I like to describe the roots of all evil being unplanned, or poorly planned, changes," states Jimmy Augustine of HP Software. "Somewhere between 70% and 80% of all service disruptions are caused by faulty changes. Somebody goes in and makes a security change to a network device, and brings down the service. Downtime equates to costs and, in some cases, lost revenue."

You would think Step #1, or something close to Step #1, for any kind of asset migration or disaster recovery plan would be to know what it is you have that you may want to recover when a disaster happens. There's an art to this, it turns out, and it's called dependency mapping. Last December, a VMware engineer we talked to listed it as #2 among his ten tips for disaster recovery planning, just after running a business impact analysis.

Sponsor

What your business has and why

Dependency mapping is a complete inventory of the software that runs your business, and the components and resources upon which they rely. What dependency mapping software tools do is quite complex, especially now that more critical business assets reside in public and hybrid clouds. Many enterprises invest in dependency mapping without even knowing what it is or why it's there. As a result, an HP software engineer tells RWW, they're racking up enormous, unnecessary costs, especially as they transition from a traditional data center to a cloud-based environment.

When the CIO or the VP of Operations discovers these costs, there typically follows a lot of cleanup having to do with fans and something hitting them. Why didn't we see this coming, they ask?

Augustine is HP's group manager of product marketing for configuration management systems (leaving just enough room on the business card for a phone number). He talked with RWW about yesterday's release of HP's latest update, called Content Pack 10, for its Discovery and Dependency Mapping Advanced (DDMA) tool. The new update addresses the ability to map assets deployed to Amazon's primary public cloud services: Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Relational Database Service (RDS) and volumes and snapshots stored with Elastic Block Store (EBS).

"There's a mentality that, when you go through a service provider, you're going to want to have this visibility, whether it's a public cloud or an outsourcing agreement or what have you. In most cases, the trust level is implicit," explains Augustine. By that, he means the reliability level that many enterprises expect when they trust their assets to the Amazon cloud. They often assume the reliability question is out of their hands. And that's actually not the case.

"So having this appropriate level of visibility allows IT managers and CIOs to make sure that service providers are doing what they spelled out in the service-level agreements, and it allows them to have peace of mind," Augustine explains. It also enables a business to respond to performance issues that do crop up by adding capacity or compute power from within their own data centers.

Now you see it

"The dynamic nature of a cloud environment, whether it's a private or public cloud, lends itself to the thinking of what we had over the last 10 or 15 years with automated discovery. You still need visibility to get to performance availability, and probably more so with the dynamic environment."

HP's management tool for configuration is called Universal Configuration Management Database (UCMDB). The dependency mapping tool discovers software components that are stored here. The visual form of UCMDB's contents is what Augustine calls a topology - like a network configuration map, only with software. Some 18 months ago, he tells us, HP started implementing a dynamic service model for UCMDB, the upshot of which was that the management tool could see whenever a new virtual machine was spun, or a new application provisioned. Since HP's monitors are already in place on customers' systems anyway, he said, it only made sense to officially begin implementing them for measuring dynamic performance and reliability issues associated with virtualization and cloud deployments.

In an HP/TechValidate survey of 13 of HP's existing UCMDB customers, 8 of those customers reported that DDMA with UCMDB reduced their time spent in the auditing process by as much as 30%.

Revealing the kind of engineering knowledge that makes him a perfect fit for HP, Augustine divides the use cases for UCMDB into the "change" group and the "steady state" group. For the latter, the transition to virtualization and/or cloud has already taken place.

"Let's say the router goes down, or we have a problem with an application. The UCMDB, by virtue of automated discovery, will allow me to understand how important that application or router is, in terms of the service it delivers to the business," he explains. "So it matters to me if I'm facilitating an e-commerce service or a back office service - the way that I respond to that performance or event is going to be different for those two examples." In other words, it's easier for you to craft separate strategies for responding to "negative impact" events - responding in different ways depending on how your customers will be affected by your response - when you have greater, more granular, visibility into what's going on.

Whereas in the case of the "change" group, Augustine repeats his warning about the root cause of all evil, which, contrary to Internet rumors, is neither money nor patents. "We've helped companies avoid disruptions altogether because they now have the visibility to understand how things relate to each other, so they're not making this change at certain points in time during the day. They're also able to respond to central issues much faster because they understand the context of mundane things like routers. When teams don't have the underlying technology or foundation that we provide, they spend a lot of time trying to understand, 'Okay, who owns that router? And how important is it?'"

He says the service maps that DDMA provides chart, from a high-level perspective of the business service, the underlying application, database, servers, storage elements, and network elements.

"IT is not getting more simple; it's getting more complex," HP's Jimmy Augustine remarks. "You add virtualization, private cloud, public cloud, mobile applications. What this is doing is increasing the layers of complexity. We have some clients with hundreds of thousands of configuration items in their UCMDB, we have some clients with millions. You have to keep everything up to date; it doesn't automatically happen. Having the discipline to go out and discover these items, either on a daily or weekly basis - an up-to-date view of how these things relate to each other - is fundamental. It's a prerequisite to managing IT as a business."

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock
Discuss

The "G" in its name used to stand for "Graphics." A few decades ago, the most delightful room for one to be in during a computer conference was the one where Silicon Graphics was showing a demo. It was like one of those dreams where you knew you weren't really on-board the Starship Enterprise, but you forced yourself to ignore that fact and look at the pretty lights and colors. When SGI ceased to be a company unto itself in April 2009, most folks wrote off the SGI brand as an historical remnant.

Wrong. It's wonderful to see a brand that never says die. Ever since Rackable Systems adopted the SGI name, it's been lucky. It's finding its way back as a high-density storage provider. This afternoon, the company is introducing a very high density storage server platform designed, its engineers tell us, to pack the maximum number of terabytes into a 19-inch rack while staying cool.

Sponsor

The result is what SGI describes as a module full of "drive bricks." Each brick can be loaded with up to nine 3.5-inch SATA or SAS drives, or 18 2.5-inch SAS or solid-state drives. If you've ever washed dishes in a cafeteria, you may have experienced something similar to the situation of hot-swapping drives in a storage rack. So SGI used a little something called "computer-aided design" to engineer a solution.

"Any time you get a system that is this dense, data center managers need to be able to access it," SGI's director of storage products, Floyd Christofferson, tells RWW in an interview. "If you've ever pulled out a large, very dense system, typically they only allow access from the front. The weight of those trays pulling all the way out adds a lot of strain on the internal cables. In large data centers, people would like to be able to access these hot-swappable parts, but really don't want to do so in a way that either puts strain on the rack itself or on the internal components."

So the slider on SGI's Modular InfiniteStorage (MIS) units can be pulled from the back or front on a nice drawer, all without tripping up a cable or maybe tripping off the power.

Each 4U MIS chassis may have one of two configurations. One is as a storage server with one or two motherboards, each with dual-socket Intel Xeon E5-2600 "Sandy Bridge" processors clocked at up to 3.3 GHz. The remaining space can be populated with either 72 3.5-inch or 144 2.5-inch drives. Alternately, the unit can be maxed out with 81 3.5-inch or 162 2.5-inch drives.

So with that many drives packed that close together, how do they keep from becoming a virtual radiator unit? We asked SGI's chief storage architect Lance Evans, who told us there's a secret in being tight but not too tight. When you push air into certain spaces under pressure, it's like breathing in through your mouth with your teeth shut tight.

"Imagine a cross-sectional slice through the chassis. At any given point along the front-to-back axis of the chassis is a certain cross-sectional air channel," explains Evans. "The smaller those channels are, the higher the pressure that the air channeling system has to be able to generate to pull more air through. Second, you have to be very careful about where that air flows. It needs to be able to flow over the components that are generating heat. If we have airflow through the machine, but it's not passing over components that are creating heat, then it's really not doing us much good. Every last little bit of air that you pull in, you need to be able to use effectively to cool the machine."

So SGI designed a high-pressure air movement system, comprised of six 60mm twin-axial, high-RPM fans positioned in the middle. They're stationed in such a way that, if one of the fans fails, it doesn't result in backflow.

Doing some math on the fly, Evans estimated the total power requirements for a fully populated SGI MIS rack at about 20 kW. That's on the high side of normal, compared to recent analysts' estimates, and perhaps a bit above normal for rack requirements circa 2009. But with firms like Dell now warning customers to expect as much as 30 kW per rack, MIS may be a viable solution for fitting big clouds into tight spaces.

Discuss

The latest release by CA Technologies of a product called Private Cloud Accelerator is being described, by folks who only read the press release and skipped the details, as a new catalog for rapidly provisioning and deploying services over a company's private cloud. But what's really nice for a prospective customer to have at a time like this, is a private cloud.

So the real news from CA today is actually this: By means of a partnership deal with Vblock infrastructure platform maker VCE, CA is making available an all-in-one, rapidly deployable private cloud package, both hardware and software, that competes directly with out-of-the-box solutions from IBM, HP and Oracle.

Sponsor

"VCE is competing directly with Oracle's Exadata and Exalogic offerings, the whole app-plus-hardware in a box. It's competing with HP's CloudSystem Matrix and IBM's CloudBurst platform," states Trevor Bunker, CA's chief technology architect, in an interview with RWW. "And why CA's partnered with VCE is, we're the only software ISV at this point to have this level of software integration and partnership with VCE."

Everybody, get in the box

VCE's Vblock systems combine ready-to-deploy cloud infrastructure systems from multiple vendors, so specialists in their respective fields may participate in an all-in-one option. The hardware is provided by Cisco's Unified Computing System with its Nexus brand switches; its storage is EMC Symmetrix VMAX and Symmetrix VNX; and its virtualization layer is based on VMware vSphere. What Private Cloud Accelerator adds to this mix is an almost turnkey approach to provisioning hardware for specific roles in just a few days' time.

Bunker tells us that scalability is often the easy part. The hard part comes when an enterprise has to present a storefront for its customer. At that point, big or small doesn't really matter so much as whether the service is available, reliable and personal.

"How can they put up a storefront - offer up services, charge for services, measure and manage the demand for those services? You can think of CA Private Cloud Accelerator as a sales office inside an apartment complex. We're accelerating the deployment and the operation of the Vblock."

Bunker's company is known for advising customers on how to jump-start failed virtualization and cloud migration projects. So he notes that one of the problems CA has often helped customers face down is the lack of content - more specifically, the trouble with getting a working service started once the hardware is provisioned.

"We can show a customer all these great end-to-end workflows, these wonderful integrations that they can do. And they'd look at it and say, 'I love it! I want that!' They'd buy it. But what the industry would sell them is a big, blank canvas. And that upset customers, because they were engaged in months - if not years - of customization, professional services. They never really got what they want, so there was a sort of general dissatisfaction with a lot of automation solutions."

Virtual portal

The system which CA jointly developed with VCE is centered around a self-service portal that CA demonstrates being used on an iPad rather than a PC. The portal serves as a simple catalog for spinning up a role, such as a database server, a test environment for SAP software, or a lab environment for Oracle E-Business suite. "We take all the processes of provisioning, configuration and automation all the way through the Vblock, and actually deploy those services," says Bunker. "If you're going to run a big platform like the Vblock that will run multiple applications or, if you're a large enterprise, support multiple departments, there's common tasks like creating virtual machines, provisioning storage, loading the software, setting up the storage, common, operational IT tasks that everyone has to do. We saw an opportunity to use our combined best practices and industry knowledge to embed those process workflows into the solution."

Since CA expects its Accelerator customers to either immediately or eventually resell their services to their own clients, it integrates billing procedures and business services. "A lot of billing solutions out there typically tend to support one, and only one, approach to billing. But it's not a one-size-fits-all world. We actually support both assets for resource-based billing and consumption-based billing," the chief architect explains. One example of the difference involves a customer providing e-mail as part of its service. The customer could pay a flat fee per month for a given number of users, or subscribe to the service on a per-user, per-megabyte basis. The former involves pre-allocation and more conventional asset-based budgeting, which some customers prefer, and which quite a bit of legacy software still requires; the latter helps businesses move the billing process from capital to operating expenditures.

A few weeks ago, we reported on public sector entities, such as cities and municipalities, that are recouping their costs for cloud migration by pooling their resources for multi-tenancy, and also selling their over-provisioned services back to storage and compute pools for use by other agencies. We wondered, would CA's billing system enable these cities to set themselves up as cloud service resellers more quickly?

"One of the things we designed into our system is the ability to take that apartment model that I mentioned before - like having multiple houses with a common water and electric supply, and be able to support n-tier tenancy," answers Trevor Bunker. While some multi-tenancy models only support "parents" and "tenants," the n-tier model enables "super-tenants" to lease services to other businesses, and also business divisions to lease services to other divisions within the same business. "We provide that visibility into the assets, the licensing, and support that from a provisioning and configuration perspective."

The overarching point that Bunker makes here is that the CA system's catalog, unlike others, offers services intended for use by administrators, not just by end customers, especially the newly-crowned IT managers who are scrambling to just get started. "How do I actually set this up, take this stand-alone application on the physical server, migrate it into the Vblock, virtualize it, and then make it ready for multiple people to consume? There's not many others out there who are looking to help those people with content."

Discuss

If you ever thought remembering HTC's titanic product line was like trying to recall the Greek alphabet, then it seems you're not alone. Phil Roberson, head of the firm's UK operations apparently thinks the display cabinet is getting a little crowded, too, telling Mobile Magazine "We have to get back to focusing on what made us great - amazing hardware." No surprises that there's been a tightening of focus after filing disappointing results just earlier this month. There's already been the odd whisper of new directions for HTC, and this year's phone roll-out is already under way, but with Roberson suggesting tablets aren't high on its list of priorities this year, we're banking on further details of 2012's product plans at next month's MWC.

HTC's UK chief wants to ease off the new-product gas, focus on 'amazing hardware' originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 26 Jan 2012 11:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink

One thing you can plainly say about Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff: You know where he stands, and he's never on the fence. Over the past two years, one of Benioff's key themes at conferences and speeches is how software design, as part of the inevitable journey of all software to the cloud, is embracing the concepts of social networking. Facebook, he professes, is a lesson in itself.

Then last August at the Dreamforce conference, Salesforce kicked the evolution of its Chatter platform into overdrive. Chatter is the communications layer that's integrated into its cloud-based CRM platform, but which is open for other developers to utilize as well - not freely, mind you, but by way of extending the Salesforce ecosystem. In a demonstration for RWW, Salesforce's director of product marketing for Chatter, Dave King, revealed elements of the platform that showed the direction Salesforce is intending for it - as clear and unmistakable a direction as a theme in a Marc Benioff speech: Chatter has already become a social network for business, and we're just now waking up to that fact.

Sponsor

Click for full-size screenshot

"It really changes the paradigm of how you consume information," says King. He's referring to a function in the current Chatter application where resources, schedule items, projects, 'opportunities,' or groups that collect any of these things together with people, may be followed like a feed in Twitter or a member of Google+.
"In the past, you would have to go and search. You would say, 'Gosh, has anything changed with my opportunity?' You'd go log in, search, and look for that update. Well now, in the social era, those updates come to you. You just specify, 'What am I interested in staying up-to-date on?'"

Each Chatter user's feed is updated with updates, some of which are submitted, others generated, others triggered by events. In fact, we learned, some of the events which trigger updates that appear in the feed may be programmed using Force.com instructions. The rules of these triggers create actions, which may in turn generate triggers for events in other users' feeds. One example King showed us appears here: In this test system, there's a business object representing a deal for "Green Dot Media" which has been followed by the fictitious user "Valerie Eastwood." The workflow rules programmed with Force.com dictate how the terms of this approval appear. This isn't some e-mail message where someone typed, "Discount %," hit the Tab key, typed "15%," hit Enter, and went to the next line. Instead, user "Sean Reynolds" entered the required parameters and triggered the approval request, which was then forwarded to Valerie.

It's the same concepts as Facebook and Google+ are using to develop functional apps for its users around their social graph APIs. But Chatter has sneaked up on business from an unexpected angle, not by competing with Microsoft Office up-front but by absorbing the social ethos about which Microsoft has lagged behind. Salesforce obvious goal: to replace e-mail.

One aspect of business communication which Outlook cannot possibly get a handle on is its quality. Much of Web communication today is impacted by analytics - by assessments of its value in a broader context. For individuals, the fear of being shy in public has recently been replaced with the threat of becoming declared irrelevant by social status indicators. Since Chatter is effectively, in a broad context, a content management system, it can analyze the relevance of businesspersons' individual contributions to the network of business transactions. It can leverage what we've learned from digital sociology to drive greater business value from personal interactions.

"You need to be connected to your social graph wherever you are," explains King, "whether it's in a browser or it's on your mobile device, or maybe it's in a separate application." He goes on to state that the typical software-based collaboration scenario, found in programs like SharePoint, tend to corral teams into silos for the convenience of the software. Those silos become echo chambers where employees eventually hear little else but their own noise.

"We believe that collaboration has to be in the context of your business process. There's a lot of communication tools, but what's really valuable is when you take collaboration and you put it on top of the work you're actually doing - around an account, or maybe a customer service case. That's where the power of Chatter comes in... Silos of collaboration are really not very powerful," the Salesforce team leader remarks. "What's really powerful is when you take the social experience, and you marry it up with a process."

One of the many resources that a Chatter user may follow is a file. (Thus not only is Salesforce applying social leverage to compete with SharePoint, it's also outmoding Megaupload along the way.) Following a file such as a presentation enables the user to track the processes that others do around that file - downloading, commenting, editing. If there are other processes that one can imagine, then conceivably a Force.com workflow may be developed for them.

Click for full-size screenshot

Another concept borrowed from social networking by Chatter is the recommendations engine - where the software actually provides the user with leads as to whom to include in a project. In a way, it's not just social networking - some might see it being dangerously close to stepping into what some would consider a managerial role. "Maybe you'd like to include Wendy in this project," for example.

"We're building this with a lot of social intelligence," explains King, "so the system - based on who you are, what you click on, what you like, what files you access, what accounts you follow - presents recommendations on who you should follow, what groups you should participate in. We're helping you with the discovery of finding out what you don't even know... It's a powerful way of building the social IQ of employees."
There's a large and growing number of functions in Salesforce Chatter Connect that resemble, or mirror, or borrow ideas from concepts we've seen in LinkedIn. Does Chatter compete with LinkedIn? Should we start considering the two in the same market segment?

Dave King answers no, citing the fact that LinkedIn and Salesforce are partners on a social data integration project. "But Facebook showed us the initial way of the user interface and the feed paradigm. And a lot of other social networks have adopted that. What's different about Chatter is that it's around your co-workers. It's how you're getting work done, and it includes business process and workflow."

That having been said, King did count Chatter as at least among the other social networks. The line between online activity and application is being blurred. And when it's Salesforce that's doing the blurring, both competitors and partners will need to take heed of whether what comes next is Salesforce doing all the talking.

Discuss

On the surface, it would seem to make sense that management is a task best performed in an organization by managers. When you apply that ethic to the emerging structure of data centers, which now use virtualization and private cloud foundations, you realize there are changes that can be made. Casting business resources as cloud services moves the budgeting process from capital expenditures to operating expenditures. And for more organizations, it means relocating management responsibilities from IT administration to a newly combined resource administration.

For these managers newly tasked with administering clouds along with people, admin tools don't make much sense. In a sweeping restructuring of its key virtualization management tools suite this morning, VMware is introducing a completely renovated dashboard for monitoring virtual data center operations, with graphs and 100-point-scale ratings designed to make better sense to people who might not, at first glance - or even second - know what any of this means.

Sponsor

Retooling VM administration as analytics "This transition from an architecture standpoint requires a new approach to IT management," states Martin Klaus, VMware's director of product marketing for vCenter Operations Management Suite, in an interview with RWW. With managers having a more marketing-centered view of the world, the new vCenter Ops will take more cues from the marketing mindset, beginning with using analytics more prominently in boiling down streams of data into need-to-know bullet points.

"As there are more moving parts that come and go more quickly, especially when you think about self-service portals," Klaus continues, "where the demand for more resources cannot be predicted up front, you need something that allows you to use analytics that give the IT administrator much more predictive controls over what's happening in environments, to intervene and intercept issues that are building before those issues impact the end users."

The revised dashboard is designed to communicate more ideas in shorter spaces. Perhaps you've noticed dashboards these days taking their cues from mobile apps, which have learned (out of necessity) to communicate greater information in shorter spaces. VMware group product manager Jai Malkani says the inspiration for nugget-izing vCenter's information into nuggets came from a recent reassessment of how its customers divide responsibilities among themselves.

"The customer teams working today in a cloud environment, what are they really focused on, and what's the top thing on their minds?" remarks Malkani. "As I worked with some 140-odd customers in the beta program over the last year, [I found] the main two areas that an ops team focuses on are: insuring and restoring service levels, making sure the problems are resolved and the environment is up and running at all times; and being pro-active toward optimizing the environment for efficiency and costs."

Administration is a two-cycle engine

Some of VMware's competitors perceive such tasks as workflows that can be diagrammed using flowchart tools. VMware is gambling that these two task areas that Malkani has identified are instead perpetual and ongoing cycles, where problems are identified, mitigated, and resolved; and ideas are generated, perfected, and implemented on a continual basis.

With respect to the cycle on the left, Malkani explains, the cloud administrator is focused on three areas: 1) The applications profile of the VM that appears to be the source of the problem. In other words, an app on that VM may be the actual source of the problem, but any remedial measure involving that VM will affect the entire profile of the apps or services in its purview; 2) Determining whether the problem is on account of how a problem app may be behaving in its environment, or instead the characteristics of the VM which presents that environment to the app - such as available capacity, or the current state of security monitoring; 3) Whether a corrective action is available in an immediately accessible manner - preferably, something which the admin can simply do and be done with it. A manager acting as an admin here would like to be given a multiple choice question, and choose the answer that appears to best resolve the problem - or to use Malkani's phrase for it, "closes the loop."

The "ideas" part of VMware's cycle are what Malkani calls optimizations - little improvements that come incrementally, instead of in great batches or overhauls. We see this concept emerging in so-called "resilience architectures," which replace typical crisis remediation methods with regular workflows that mitigate problems by their very nature, so that the responses to problems are essentially the same as everyday maintenance. "Do this [on the right-hand side] so that the left-hand side doesn't happen in the first place," he illustrates.

Fewer silos sounds like a good idea

The drive toward easier-to-understand metrics, and reducing and compartmentalizing dashboards with graphs and icons, is not a trend that was started by VMware. It's an increasingly competitive field, with an emerging ecosystem around management tools that fill in the gaps that management suites have left open.

Speaking with RWW, VMware's Martin Klaus admitted that one of his company's explicit goals for vCenter Ops was the reduction of the need for certain third-party tools, or for anyone else to come in thinking they need to patch the holes in vCenter. Its strategy here takes a cue from its competition, even borrowing some of its language: The new suite will incorporate tools that were offered for VMware's previous vCenter Operations tools as add-ons, including the Chargeback Manager tool that produces forecasts of future expenditures when current conditions are left as they are, compared to the savings recouped from making adjustments.

"Before, there were too many element levels, management tools in place that made for overlaps in some of the data," says Klaus. "But there's only one person sitting in front of these tools. And it was not possible for him to correlate the data that each of these tools were collecting. So with vCenter Operations, you can now see the data from third-party monitoring tools - from the storage layer, the networking layer, the database layer, the Web server layer - coming together. And now you can take a step back: What is really needed in terms of net-new data points? In this case, you can reduce the overall number of monitoring tools that are needed in the environment."

General availability of vCenter Operations Management Suite begins now, with various licensing rates beginning at $50 per VM.

Discuss

The creator of the Piston Enterprise Operating System, or PentOS, was lauded for his contributions in helping to create cloud computing itself, through the pioneering NASA Nebula project. There, NASA first demonstrated how to fit a data center cluster in an ordinary shipping container, proving the space program can still produce benefits today.

But last year, Joshua McKenty one-upped himself. He fit an almost entirely self-provisioning cloud operating system for a common rack of servers, onto a USB thumb drive. You plug the thumb device into a PC, edit maybe three lines of a text configuration file, save it, unplug it, plug it into the main server in the rack, and turn it on.

Sponsor

In a very clever demonstration video (above), McKenty demonstrates what I call the "Just Add Water" nature of the configuration process. On Wednesday, Piston Cloud's PentOS - the first commercial implementation of OpenStack, born from NASA Nebula - emerged from public beta into general availability. In addition came news that Dell has signed on as a provider of Piston Cloud-certified hardware. (I remember the hoops Dell's predecessor, PCs Limited, had to jump through to become DOS-certified.)

On the first birthday of Piston Cloud's existence, in an effort to share news as to the progress of its efforts toward the goal of world domination, company officials have provided via Twitter this detailed glimpse of its own progress chart, shown here as originally depicted through the medium of frosting.

Discuss

Way back in 1984, a company called Applied Business Technology Corp. produced a partly open source project management tool called Open Workbench. After it became part of a company called Niku in 2000, its resource management features had become leveraged for use for inventory of business applications. Big businesses - especially ones formed through mergers and acquisitions - ended up with more software than they knew what to do with.

By the time the former Computer Associates - now just CA Technologies - acquired Niku and made it into its Clarity division, application portfolio management had become one of Niku's top selling points. This morning, as Clarity now officially enters version 13, it's being offered for the first time as a service. But even with a cloud-based option, Clarity should not be thought of specifically as a cloud migration tool for business resources, but rather as a tool for first evaluating whether such a migration is necessary. This from CA's own vice president for marketing, in an interview with ReadWriteWeb.

Sponsor

"I think there's been this whole, kinda, hype where everybody's heard, 'cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud.' It's actually not cost effective to move everything to the cloud," remarks CA Technologies Vice President Kelly Blice. "And it's actually not necessary to move everything to the cloud, nor do you want to."

Click for full-screen.

In a marketing push this week for the new Clarity Project Portfolio Manager version 13, CA is touting the product's completely redesigned front end, which does appear to borrow some ideas from Salesforce. The new system is based around a modularized dashboard that digests data from multiple sources to produce a more streamlined summary. The feeling with previous editions has been that, as projects become more complex and as Clarity represents those projects, shall we say, faithfully, the responsibility for managing the data associated with those projects gets sloughed off onto the shoulders of the IT department.

The goal for v. 13 is to move the product back to its original, circa 1984 target audience: managers and business analysts.

Click for full-screen.

As an organization in transformation, Blice remarks, "I need to figure out what I need to take to the cloud, what needs to be working on the cloud and what doesn't, and what makes sense when. That's really what Clarity allows you to do. In a transformational way, what we've done is added functionality, both by making the navigation very, very easy for business users, for analysts, for managers making these decisions along with people who are actually using the solution."

The catchphrase CA's UI designers kept in mind, Blice tells us, as they were rebuilding Clarity's front end was, "Two Clicks to Value." Clarity users may have various roles within their organization - they may be project management officers (PMOs) organizing the portfolio (above), or personnel managers holding their staff members to changing milestones (below). For essential tasks in the program, they should only take two clicks to reach what they want. And for functionality that may actually be buried deeper than two clicks, users should be able to personalize their dashboards so that they are accessible in one or two clicks.

Click for full-screen.

In the first instance of social integration for Clarity, the service now adds the option to have the search for certain planning solutions be crowdsourced among multiple users.
"What we're hearing from our customers is that a lot of times, they start with these concepts that they think are what the customers need, but somewhere down the line they figure it's not. That could be [because] it's not the functionality that they need, it's not the service they need. It could be because we can't supply them the time they need, because we didn't get it. So what we've done to address that is, we have the ability to actually crowdsource and provide 'ideation' to a company. That allows them to understand what their customers want, and then with requirement planning, [assess] what their requirements are."

In this context, the crowdsourcing concept lets multiple users, including the company's own customers, collaborate in defining project goals. Social tools will be provided to let folks vote these ideas up or down. Think of Reddit for management.

The incorporation of ideation lets a Clarity v. 13 user itemize customer requirements, then experiment with varying priorities for meeting those requirements individually and over time, using these voting tools. The tool will project what resources would be utilized for each trial run, and when those resources would become available for other projects again. "If you prioritize them right, some other project isn't going to come along and take all your resources."

Clarity PPM v. 13 continues to be made available now in its traditional, on-premise format, or alternately as a self-upgrading service through CA Services.

Discuss