Cisco clouds : A conversation with a friend

We met at the  Avalon Club party as part of the CloudExpo 2010. We chatted under British heavy rock louder than ever and eating some seared tuna, salmon with wine.

Your large organization wants a private cloud with all data local and secure. You have a very large data base and growing I promised to share with you  what I discovered myself and maybe all this people will attend the next Cloud Expo event.

This is what I dug out in the last 6 weeks

Cloudera has a seminar on how to integrate Hadoop with DB and BI applications
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/515000760

Anil Madan, eBay, Director of Engineering, Analytics Product Development  leads the team at eBay that is leveraging its data assets to do advanced insights and analytics

Jeff Hammerbacher, Cloudera, Founder and Chief Scientist conceived, built, and led the Data team at Facebook. The Data team was responsible for inventing and building powerful data analysis applications on Hadoop

Here are  some notes from A NoSQL Evening in Palo Alto
http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/10/28/notes-from-a-nosql-evening-in-palo-alto.html

See Wikipedia for a good definition of NoSQL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosql

See here the Dynamo paper from Amazon AWS

See Werner Vogel blog about this paper and link to the pdf text
http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/10/amazons_dynamo.html

There a couple startups developing products based on Dynamo
like  Basho Riak http://www.basho.com/

A few words for  membase used extensively at Zynga.com

http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/08/membase-the-database-powering.php

Membase, is a "NoSQL" database optimized for storing web applications.
Membase was developed by Zynga, NorthScale, and NHN, and its source code
 released as open source in June of this year.

I don't want to overwhelm you with non ACID scalable cloud new fledgling
companies and geeks Yet it is nice to know they exist

You asked a very good question: where o I go to have the complete cloud solution delivered and supported? Cloud Expo we had quite a number of product companies, but no one with total solution, including professional services.

Cisco Systems has an interesting approach.

http://www.cisco.com/assets/cdc_content_elements/flash/sp_strategy/USD/workbook/index.html
You see an architecture where the cloud compuring is simple an overlay on the Unuified Service delivery. Cisco identified heir market for cloud as the service providers niche, and it is estimated at $49B  per year in 2013. Cisco Believes:

 First, we see our partner ecosystem as central to Data Center Business Advantage.  We have a world-class stable of development partners we work with for solution development (everyone from Intel to VMware to SAP to name a few).  The fact that we have these open solutions stack is one of the advantages of Data Center Business Advantage–it gives customers flexibility and choice and allows them to work with the favorite vendors.

The second thing worth pointing out is the critical role of professional services.  Whether it is services from Cisco Services, from one of our channel partners, or from a blend of the two, services are going to be fundamental to any successful data center strategy.

So this is all about services. One cannot sell a cloud via one product only.

See also this flyer
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/ns951/ag_c45-533403.pdf

Please note that Cisco has an ecosystem of 40,000 partners!!!. I saw a Webex talk at Cloud Expo. The speaker said, before they were acquired  by Cisco, they sold 95% directly and 5% via partners. In Cisco is the other way around. They sell 95% via partners. Even is only 10% of the partners resell WebEx (Gartner is such a customer), this means they have to test the implementations for 4,000 different partners!

Dell also acquired Boomi, as they offered integration services, but this seems more opportunistic rather a clear vision for cloud offerings

A large private cloud implementation offers a few options

1.      Buy one or two "cloud" products and then System Management is left to deal with the complexity and responsibility. It may mean many sleepless nights and risk, which a sysadmin administrators are not paid to take them

2.      Get informed on what is going in the startup technology  and specify a solution with the realm of reality, in addition to what big boys offer for sale. Get some consultants to help navigate the seas

Specify a contract and interview some players who provide all services. These players should have the ability to partner with some leading edge start ups

#2 and #3 may seem more complicated, but are by far more convenient. Also in designing the  private cloud, only the absolute minimum features (MMFs) -  the ones required to make happy your users base - should be considered. This will keep both costs down and will deliver the cloud in record time.

My recommendation for Cisco is not based on my experience with them But they have a realistic goal. They want to help all Service Providers to move to cloud and this is a real, $49B market by 2013, making room for by  far bigger revenues  than any exhibitor at Cloud Expo will ever have.  Also I like their common platform for Unified Services Delivery, plus their understanding of Internet’s future traffic are great assets. According to Cisco,  video will exceed 91% of consumer IP traffic, Mobile data will grow nearly 4,000% and cloud traffic grows nearly 300%

This will require new levels of integration between the Network and the core - cloud Data Center plus  GPS-precision in  resource location at multiple sites

We want our customers to reach us easily from everywhere, and we want the data to be available fast and without degradation. Then we want to re-use as many resources as possible
In my humble opinion, this is not available off the shelf. But no matter what the budget is, one can try to start implementing a proof of concept and then deploy in production.

Oracle suggest we buy and Exalogic server appliance and then we drop it in Data Center and we can handle all the traffic from ebay.com or Facebook. I love the idea but I wonder whether it is not too beautiful to be true :-)