John talked about Microsoft’s mission, his perspectives on key industry trends and market opportunity; he touched on Cloud Computing and Virtualization and took some Q&A from the audience of Managed Service Provider executives.

One of his first proclamations - Microsoft has really embraced the heterogeneous environment. Really? How in the world is Microsoft going to help convince IT line managers, or mid level managers to believe this statement? I think they have a long way to go to achieve this vision with any credibility in the marketplace.  I do know that they are making small strides.

Microsoft has been widely credited with some very good blogs that are self critical and introspective. They have also been quite active in the standards boards within DMTF and many others such as Open WSMAN and CIMON (Open Pegasus). Microsoft in February published 30,000 pages detailed technical specifications – protocol documentation for Exchange, since that time they have published another 15,000 pages. They have had over 224,000 downloads since February 21, 2008. Thus they are trying to be more open by making some of these secret sauce protocol resources directly available on the web.

So for now, I will take a very cautious wait and see approach to this proclamation. Time will tell.

Trends

• Rapid growth continues
• Hosting Competition has a new face
  • Platform gorillas (amazooglesoft)
  • Ad supported Web 2.0 hosters (Google, Facebook,)
• Utility Cloud Computing models are expanding to non-traditional hosting companies
  • Wells Fargo vSafe - hard to believe that a big bank would start to offer a SaaS offering
  • New tools and markets digital ribbon, CohesiveIT

IDC Data shows that growth of SaaS ISV’s is the biggest layer of growth. The fastest growing services are complex, custom applications. IDC says this area will be bigger than the hosting area in the next 5 years. John said that Microsoft is spending a lot of time, money and energy on this right now.

John said:

“when Microsoft thinks about the building blocks that make-up the cloud, virtualization is a core piece of the puzzle. However you also need also identity services, Operating system with standard set of libraries to tap into… or remote storage that application developers will tap into.. Developers will consume these set of services, but you will also need a set of tools to manage your physical, virtual and geographically distributed datacenter infrastructure.” (that is where ScienceLogic comes in!!)

He went on to say,

“In some ways, virtualization enables decentralization – allows you to move from data centers, enables fast scaling out, business to move from on premise to the cloud and off again…. Automation is very important – this will help you scale your business – this is core to your future success.”

He talked about a new breed of knowledge worker: He called them Digital Natives (compared to grey haired guys like me who are left out of this category).

Definition of a Digital natives? A young adult who has grown up with cellphone, web based applications, Facebook account, as their primary mode of communications.

John commented that we are 5 years into a 10 year journey. Only 12% of all servers in the world are virtualized today… in the next 4 years it will double to 25%. This is the time to think through how this business will affect you.

‘Virtualization without good management is more dangerous than not using virtualization in the first place.” Thomas Bittman, Analyst Gartner

Patching and provisioning nightmare – no scalable administration – sprawl chaos.

John posed a question to the audience: How do you partner to provide the ISV support in application development with specific market needs… partner by keeping the hosting to SaaS solution providers up and running and provide the quality of service that their customers expect…. Complimentary services of storage and backup is a big win with a huge market-upside over the next 5 years..

John said that Microsoft continues to make  huge investments with Managed Service Providers.

• Investing in the windows hosting platform
• Hyper V and SQL2008 GoLive program - getting beta code out to service provides to find as many bugs as early as possible.
• Software + Services (S+S) incubation center program
• Partnering for cloud platform market offers
• Cloud platform guidance and best practices

During the Q&A, David Burns from Cincinnati Bell asked the very best question… “when are you going to make it easier for the Service Provider market to deal with the Microsoft Service Provider Licensing Agreement (SPLA) quarterly statistics pull and change the SPLA pricing to be more efficient and creative for the new Virtualization and Cloud offerings you have talked about?”

John’s response: “We hear your frustrations loud and clear and are working on some new ideas for the future version of SPLA.” My interpretation – “Dear Service Providers don’t expect anything new or easier to deal with in the next 6 months!”

His closing remarks: “Cloud is evolving = very early stages, lots of hype, but think of how this evolution will effect your business and how you can plug into it.”

The Cisco 7600 OSR consists of a 256 Gbps switching fabric and a 30 million packets per second (mpps) forwarding engine. Its breadth of IP services comes from Cisco IOS, which provides features such as security, enhanced QoS, and destination sensitive services. In addition, the Cisco 7600 OSR allows the migration of existing port adapters from Cisco 7500 series routers, via the Cisco FlexWAN module, giving service providers one the industry’s widest array of interface options in any single platform. This provides service providers great flexibility in deploying the Cisco 7600 OSR for a variety of applications, protects their investment in existing systems, and gives them a practical migration path to the New World Optical Internet.

A Revolutionary Platform For Evolving Networks

The Cisco 7600 OSR helps service providers break through service and bandwidth barriers today, while designing networks to scale for future growth. The Cisco 7600 OSR achieves this through “adaptive network processing,” or the ability to evolve the platform for new IP services without hardware upgrades. Unlike fixed, ASIC-based platforms, which are hardware encoded, the Cisco 7600 OSR relies on the highly flexible Parallel eXpress Forwarding (PXF) technology for scalable performance of services. PXF is a patented, Cisco-developed network processor capable of line-rate IP services delivery that can support new IP services through periodic software upgrades. Each OSM has two PXF processors capable of 12 mpps of IP services delivery per interface card.

“IP+Optical combines the dynamism of the Internet world with the foundation of the transport world, creating an infrastructure that can deliver the services that service providers need,” said Lele Nardin, vice president of the Internet Systems Business Unit at Cisco. “Cisco will continue to add innovative solutions on top of this solid foundation to make service providers better equipped to meet the constantly escalating and changing customer demands for new networking services.”

Pricing and Availability

The base Cisco 7600 OSR system is list priced at $73,000 and the entry level system, with interfaces, start at $100,000. The interfaces modules are priced between $27,000 to $180,000. The Cisco 7600 OSR is available now worldwide.

IBM announced today that it was spending US$300 million to build out 13 data centers in 10 countries in 2008 - IBM refers to these sites as "Business Resilience service delivery centers". These centers will certainly help IBM deliver more of its traditional IT recovery services but they will also support the next generation of IT continuity services - repeatable, scalable, productize services such as online backup and virtual recovery.  These types of services don't require massive capital investment in an inventory of heterogeneous server and storage platforms, instead the service provider can focus its efforts on building a scalable pool of virtualized servers and shared storage built with industry standard components.

Online backup is an important service because it provides an affordable information protection service for small and medium businesses and it's even useful for enterprises as a means to backup PCs corporate-wide as well as small servers at remote locations. In addition to the $300 million that IBM is spending on its new resiliency centers, late in 2008, it acquired Arsenal Digital Solutions, one of the major players in online backup.

In addition to online backup, recovery services using software-based replication to a cloud infrastructure will also open up new opportunities. These services will provide a much a better recovery time and recovery point than tape-based services but won't cost nearly as much as custom services based on storage-based replication and dedicated hardware. The cost of these services is more than most small and medium, even some large enterprises can or are willing to pay for. SunGard was the first to announce such a productized service, Forrester expects all the traditional DR service providers to bring similar offerings to market over time.

These cloud-based service offerings are important for several other reasons, first, it could help stem the tide of enterprises who are just so fed up with the traditional disaster recovery services model that they take DR back in house, second, it could convince, more medium size businesses that they can afford more advanced IT continuity solutions and lastly, it will help protect their market against new competitors who can simply partner with cloud providers such as Amazon S3 and Google to offer similar services.

IBM is not only using its expansion and acquisitions to stay competitive, it's also also hoping that customers will recognize the value of IBM expertise, process and best practices in BC.

What do you think? Does the reputation and expertise of BC and IT Continuity service providers like IBM and SunGard critical in your decision-making or can new players enter the market? Do these lower cost services that offer better RTO and RPO renew your interest in service providers or do you still plan to keep DR in-house?

I welcome your thoughts.

Dear network vendor,

As someone that is forced to configure and implement security on your hardware, I would greatly appreciate stable code and properly functioning features. Unfortunately, I cannot always choose the hardware my customers are using in their infrastructure. However, if you would like for me to recommend they continue purchasing and using it, then the product must demonstrate to me that it is: capable, reliable, predictable and well-documented. If your product is not meeting these requirements, I’m forced to recommend other solutions to your (current) customer.

Stable Code. If I have to spend 2-6 hours per implementation working through your product’s bugs, and then must either spend time on a support call or spend time getting packet captures to prove to you it’s not working, I am not a happy camper because you’re slowing down my progress. Your customer is not happy because they’re paying for that time and I’m not cheap.

Features. Don’t publish in technical documentation that your product, or code can do something, only for me to find out later that it cannot. On-site in the middle of an implementation is not the time to architect Plan B. Let me know before, either through technical docs, white papers, best practices or release notes. I do read those. If you want to bend the truth, do it the marketing fluff, not my technical documents.

Documentation. If your product does do what you say it does, then please do document and explain the concepts and procedures. Examples are good, but explanations are mandatory. A correct CLI reference is always lovely as well. If there are got’chas or tricks, please also document those. Again, white papers or release notes are fine. Having to track down the one security engineer from your company that holds the magic key is not practical, nor scalable. Plus, he may be on vacation during my install, which would make me irate.

Support. If your product is not functioning or performing as expected, do NOT expect your customers to have a current maintenance contract to address a known issue or bug (or an un-known issue or bug for that matter). If they found a bug for you, you should probably give them a maintenance contract for a year… or two. If you don’t let us call support, I will find one of your pre-sales engineers and we will use him or her for post-sales support, which is not what you want them to do. But that’s your problem, not mine.

I believe that sums up the major issues. Specifically, I am interested in security, RADIUS, SSH, SNMP, DHCP and 802.1X functions. Before you add another bell or tweak another whistle, please make what you have works… consistently. That should be first, so it’s my Feature Request #1.

Respectfully,

jj

# # #

First of all, I’d like to point out a major difference between the Gartner conference and the big Cisco Live user conference going on down here at the same time. Keynotes start at 8am at the Gartner show – and before that is breakfast, networking, etc. etc. John Chambers’ keynote over at Cisco Live starts at 10am. 8am versus 10am. I knew there was a reason I should have been a network engineer…

But here’s something they don’t have at Cisco Live – VP & Distinguished Analyst Thomas Bittman talking about Cloud Computing and the Future of Infrastructure.

(Picture credit: WATBlog)

Point: The idea is that it’s complex to create computing power so we should centralize it among a few providers (Google, Amazon, ebay) to gain economies of scale. Ability to drive down price by centralizing and getting to scale is just too compelling. In this scenario, computing is a commodity; IT is a commodity. Remember Nick Carr’s controversial book, “Does IT Matter”?

Gartner Counterpoint: IT is not a commodity because of constant innovation. So it’s not about a big investment in old/stagnating technology but more about developing and investing in agility. There will be not a few cloud computing providers but thousands.

A quick definition of Cloud Computing by Gartner: a style of computing where massively scalable IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service to external customers using Internet technologies.

Cloud Computing Drivers:

• connections are becoming pervasive (anywhere, anytime)
• response time expectations are shrinking
• relationships are online and short-lived

Tom Bittman shared a view of the evolution of the data center – from “Silos to Clouds”. Prior to about 2002, data centers were sprawled siloed organizations focused on component management. Over time, hardware cost went down, flexibility is up spurred by technologies like virtualization and creating fluid pools of capacity that can be moved around intelligently. What we are moving towards is automated, services-oriented environment in data centers that are focused on enabling agility. Ecco Cloud Computing!

Gartner predictions:

• By 2012, 80% of the Fortune 100 will be paying for some cloud computing services, and
• 30% will be paying for cloud computing infrastructure services.

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Synopsis:  Blue Box Special Edition #25: An interview with Eric Hernaez, CEO of Solegy, about the OpenSBC project

Welcome to Blue Box: The VoIP Security Podcast Special Edition #25, a 13-minute podcast  from Dan York and Jonathan Zar covering VoIP security news, comments and opinions.   

Download the show here (MP3, 6MB) or subscribe to the RSS feed to download the show automatically. 

You may also listen to this podcast right now:

Show Content:

In this interview, I sat down with Eric Hernaez, CEO of Solegy, to talk about the OpenSBC Project and how it provides an open source implementation of a session border controller (SBC).  We talked about how OpenSBC came about, who is using it, how scalable it is and where users can learn more.  We also discussed Solegy, the company supporting the open source OpenSBC project and what they are doing. It was an enjoyable talk that really came about randomly when I met Eric near the press room at IT Expo in Los Angeles back in September 2007. We had been wanting to learn more about the OpenSBC project so I put my recorder on a table and we started talking.

More information about the OpenSBC project and other open source SIP-related projects can be found at opensourcesip.org.

Production assistance on this Special Edition was provided by Sergio Meinardi.

Comments, suggestions and feedback are welcome either as replies to this post  or via e-mail to blueboxpodcast@gmail.com.  Audio comments sent as attached MP3 files are definitely welcome and will be played in future shows.  You may also call the listener comment line at either +1-415-830-5439 or via SIP to 'bluebox@voipuser.org' to leave a comment there. 

Thank you for listening and please do let us know what you think of the show.