VP of Electricity

Randy Rayess on techcrunch proposes that the CIO is the next VP of Electricity.

Imagine the turn of the 20th century, electricity delivery for a company had to be managed.  Often companies would stand up their own infrastructure to deliver electricity within a building or factory.  To support this infrastructure, there would be a team of electrical specialists, electricians, that would maintain the equipment and support the infrastructure.  Once electricity became a utility, much of this was replaced by the vendor and sold as-a-Service to the customer.

Comparing that to the CIO is interesting because there are some parallels, but not entirely and not in the single component delivery requirement that was under the VP of Electricity.

Consider, for instance, that the CIO's primary goal is to keep the IT Infrastructure delivering the application.  Actually applications.  <--  The plural is incredibly important here. It's not a single service, it's tens, hundreds, sometimes even thousands of applications.

These applications need to inter-operate enough to use common foundational services like networking and data center, platform systems and virtualization, and the growing analytics necessary to make ever increasing critical business decisions.  While we may think about them from a consumption perspective, and that reduces many of the applications to in-business-quarter costs, which is great for current business controlling their financial run rate, but

Inter-operation doesn't happen by magic and someone needs to be in a position to manage these as-a-Service applications before they sprawl into a buffet style line of out of control applications that not only don't support the business objectives, but don't deliver the critical value that is required by the business.  Not to mention the potential risks of data breach and loss that happen when applications are deployed without planning.

Then, consider that the cost of electricity isn't going down.  At best, it's stagnant over long periods of time at commercial rates, but the cost is going up and it's guaranteed to go up.  The use of electricity is also increasing as we put in more general purpose hardware to support more applications on even more virtualized platforms.

My contention to the article is that while we don't need the turn of the 20th century VP of Electricity, we do need to continue to think about the sunk cost in the delivery of applications.  We need to have someone thinking about the plethora of applications needed by each industry to operate as well as the infrastructure and critical access to both private and public services.

Who better than the person that understand's the business demand.

Top of Rack - higher speed, higher density

How energy dense do you want to make your rack.

Arista announces two new switches that certainly fit high density, high speed ToR models.

Loaded with QSFP100 and backward compatible all the way to....10Gbps.

100GbE, 40GbE, 4x10GbE, 4x25GbE or 2x 50GbE

New Arista Switches

The thing I find really interesting, because we all know port densities and bandwidth is guaranteed to grow anyway... but,

7W / port

Evidently Arista believes that electrical consumption is a sunk cost in servicing the workload....

So do I.

This really drives the concept of the "logical rack" the number of racks that can be covered by a pair of ToR switches in the Spine and Leaf architectural model.

Let's conduct a short breakdown on the 32 port unit.

~ 28 100GbE connections for hosts (so, 28 hosts in ~ 2 racks at 2U size)

~28 40GbE connections for hosts ( 28 hosts in ~ 2 racks at 2U size)

~112 10GbE or 25GbE connections for hosts  (112 hosts in ~ 7 racks at 2U size)

~56 50GbE connections for hosts  (56 hosts in ~ 4 racks at 2U size)

using a pair of ports for 100GbE uplink and a pair of ports for inner-Leaf connections (not including options with the SFP+ ports)

Makes for some very well connected hosts and at ~18kW / rack, some fairly dense commodity computing....

Hybrid Cloud, how it can look....

Hybrid Cloud Network Model

The control plane is separated from the data plane.

The capability is completely API driven.

Imagine now an environment that is fully automated and orchestrated.  

It has QoS for the Enterprise Application.

It has Bandwidth Management for financial management

It has the possibility to connect at Layer 2, extending an application back to the Private Cloud

It has SLA

It has well understood Latency

It avoids the Internet completely

Want to know more?  Follow the Twitter hashtag #harnessthecloud

Hybrid Cloud, how it used to look....

Islands of automation areas in Cloud connectivity

And I'm not joking about owning every possible problem on the internet.

If you would like to see how it can be done now, please follow this link:

http://www.vdatacloud.com/blogs/2015/09/23/the-network-is-the-computer/

Goats and superChickens

Oddly enough, both of these are IT discussions.

The first one is how to disrupt enough to change the current status quo for Devops to work without breaking the things that work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LcQUAMS4XQ

The second is how to build teams that work.

http://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_heffernan_why_it_s_time_to_forget_the_pecking_order_at_work?language=en 

....

In summary:

 -- successful IT needs to have goats (first story) for continuous integration
 -- successful IT needs to have chickens (second story) to have successful teams.

The moral of the story:

Goats are versatile and useful (and cute)

AND superChickens aren't all that good for a team

Oddly enough, goats and chickens get along with each other.

Amazon Web Services in Plain English

https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-in-plain-english


Funny and ... useful

VMworld 2015 Favorite Quote

Not much more to say about that.