VMware CEO Discusses "The Cloud Era"
By Bob Bryant, DISA Corporate Communications
Paul Maritz, chief executive officer of VMware, was the keynote speaker on Aug. 17 for the 2011 DISA Customer & Industry Forum in Baltimore, Md. He described a new era in computing, known as the cloud, which is characterized by new efficiencies and systems that assist in decision making.
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| Paul Maritz, CEO of VMware, described the "third era in computing," in which "we're going from hundreds of millions of users to billions of users" and "enormous growth in scale — not only in terms of the number of users but also scale in terms of the number of sources of potential real-time information." |
We are on the threshold of a new era of interaction between classic information technology (IT) and consumer-driven change. It will be about many forces working together and not about where computing is done. “The profound changes are in how computing will be done,” said Maritz.
How do we make this transition? We can’t walk away from existing investments, but we need to free up funds to invest in the future.
“Too many businesses are sitting on an applications infrastructure that was written for a world that was fundamentally not real-time — a world of paper deals — and those businesses are not going to be able to serve the Facebook generation, who expects to see information in real time in the context that is appropriate, without a fundamental review of not just the infrastructure but the applications themselves,” Maritz said. “So, we face a crucial issue of how do we become fundamentally more efficient in our existing operations in order to free up the funds for the future.”
The history of computing started with the mainframe and moved to client-server and now to the cloud, Maritz explained.
“Now we’re going into the third era, and the key thing here is that we’re going from hundreds of millions of users to billions of users and it’s not just personal computers that they’re holding in their hands,” he said. “In 12 months, 50 percent of the devices attached to the Internet will not be PCs, and within three years, PCs will probably be less than 20 percent of devices attached to the Internet. And these are not just human devices but sensor devices, feeding information in unprecedented quantities. So, we’ll see enormous growth in scale — not only in terms of the number of users but also scale in terms of the number of sources of potential real-time information.”
The amount of information will drive change — an order of magnitude change — and the need for efficiency.
“This is the kind of change that we’re going to have to confront. We can’t free up the funds for the future unless we set those standards for efficiency that we have to reach. And those standards are being pioneered now by the consumer environment,” said Maritz.
“Real-time analytics will define this new era. We need new development paradigms and data fabrics and, above all, to run our existing operations more efficiently to free up the funds to confront this challenge,” he said.
We have so much invested in current applications that we cannot walk away from them. We’ll have to continue to run them for a long time.
“So, a lot of the innovation is going to have to happen in the infrastructure underneath the applications. So, if we can take the existing applications and put them on a modernized infrastructure … and get higher levels of efficiency, that will allow us to free up the funds to tackle the next generation of conical applications that will define this new era,” Maritz said.
The IT agenda for the cloud era requires three levels of change inside the IT industry. There must be data center efficiencies that facilitate the movement to shared services and drive the infrastructure to higher levels of utilization. There must be an application transformation; this is where real mission value is achieved because, “you can do only so much with the plumbing.” Finally, there must be end-user computing transformation because the number of applications and the devices in the hands of users will be out of the control of the CIO, Maritz asserted.
“The idea is to aggregate and pool resources more efficiently. The bigger the set of resources you can schedule over, the better the efficiency because you can smooth out the peaks and valleys. … In IT, we really don’t have good metrics. We overprovision to cover our maximum need. So, not only can you pool, but you can get better metrics and can manage more effectively, spreading the resource cost over many tenants, who benefit from shared efficiency. And you can figure out who’s using what resources and incentivize particular behavior,” he said.
In a cloud-oriented approach, three things must change: edge security, management and monitoring, and the instrumentation and introspection of applications.
Applications have “protected edge functions” that also have to be virtualized — no longer on physical boundaries but on logical boundaries. With physical boundaries, an attacker only has to get past a firewall to have access to multiple applications. If the firewall is virtualized, each application can have its own protection. Ultimately, security has to go right inside the application itself because you won’t be able to trust the other applications with which you interact. We must monitor what’s going on in a non-intrusive way, Maritz said.
In the management and monitoring arena, there is so much information being handled that we need to go to a system to watch the infrastructure — a system that takes in all the information and runs it through a sophisticated statistical analysis to determine what’s normal and compares it to an ideal model to see if all is within predicted statistical bounds. This is real-time analytics applied in the context of the infrastructure itself. These models tend to be much more sensitive than humans to detect abnormal behavior, he said.
This all matters from a business perspective because “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Today in IT, we only have coarse metrics to measure IT,” said Maritz.
The cloud era, through virtualization, the cloud, and software as a service, enables standardized IT metrics. For example, you can measure the cost to provision, the cost per gigabyte of storage, the time to provision, and the cost to provision an e-mail box. Also, you can take the numbers from your CIO and compare them to rates offered by others, he explained.
“One thing we know is that when you start to measure things, it leads to increased efficiencies,” said Maritz.
Maritz discussed three key forces in application transformation: new frameworks that hide the complexity of programming, data fabrics, and new ways to provision both applications and data.
We see tremendous innovation in programming, and the asset is the programmer not the machine. “We need to optimize ourselves, and let the computer sweat,” he said.
New data fabrics are emerging because many applications cannot run on relational databases. A program called GemFire processes 60,000 updates per second; it can’t do that on a relational database, said Maritz.
The challenge is to go beyond the Windows desktop. We need a new mechanism that allows the installation of applications to users instead of to devices so that users can reach these applications from any device, he said.
Also, a new generation of collaboration tools is needed. Today’s white-collar worker is not the same as the worker of 1975, Maritz stated. Now, workers consume streams of information coming to them.
“The challenge is to help them filter those streams” and to be able to provide useful information to others. “So, perhaps, this is the post-document era as well as the post-PC era,” he said.
We can’t live in a completely isolated world; so, we have to move security from perimeter checks to behavioral monitoring — just as some financial institutions do today for credit scoring and fraud detection. Your credentials just allow you to log on and play. Real-time analytics will be used to score you against a model of normality, said Maritz.
“At the end of the day, security has to become a way of life for our industry. It’s a big cultural challenge,” Maritz said. But we can do it and get used to it — just like taking our shoes off at the airport.
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