What's next for BYOD

It wasn't too long ago that business professionals carried pagers, multiple cell phones, and lugged around laptop computers. Fast-forward ten years, and the dream of consolidating all corporate information and access in such a way that it could be managed within one singular device has been achieved - sort of.

Although an influx of younger workers have emerged, many of whom are willing to become "anytime, anywhere" employees via BYOD Bring your Own Device ideology, many employers are still uneasy about allowing trade secrets and other confidential business information to touch employee-owned devices. Enter: the cloud. Could advancements in cloud computing be the solution to BYOD security problems?

According to Jim Reavis (executive director of the Cloud Security Alliance), the biggest challenge associated with BYOD Bring Your Own Device is that administrators must find ways to provide corporate data to end users while still keeping it separate and managed. In other words, corporate enterprises don't want their employees to mix business with pleasures. One major concern is the use of app stores on their mobile devices. The fear is that inadequate app store security could cause breaches in confidential company data.
The cloud is able to assist IT departments with the conundrum of BYOD security. Security as as Service products from businesses like Barracuda Networks and Sophos paired with mobile device management services can prevent potential breaches in security. Additionally, cloud computing is able to change the way in which corporate IT professionals must deal with malware. Instead of running software on laptops to continuously scan for malware, a cloud-based anti-malware service is able to scan data before it even has the chance to reach the device.

The ability for IT professionals to cut out the time and costs associated with running various software scanning solutions on mobile devices is invaluable in the business world.

Yet although automated cloud security procedures and services could drastically change the opinions of numerous enterprises regarding the safety of BYOD, it's still smart to keep end users educated and establishing BYOD policies. All employees should be trained to understand that that security features, key locks, passwords, etc. are non-negotiable security measures and that attempting to remove or disable them from their devices will not be permitted. It is the combination of cloud-based security paired with cooperation from your staff that will ensure that confidential business information is protected.

SAP BusinessObjects support for Mobile

One of the first challenges we have run up against in our SAP BO 4.x project comes from a fairly innocuous business requirement. Simply put, the solution must allow viewing of  reports using any of the top web browsers, regardless if running on a desktop or mobile device. A very reasonable requirement. In addition, we'd love to use BO Dashboard reports where possible, rather than WebI or Crystal as we have done in the past.  But as we begun to explore BO Dashboards through mobile browsers more we ran into the following issues:

• Reports built using SAP Dashboard Designer render in Flash. And of course Flash is not supported on iOS. SAP's indirect answer to this is to use SAP BusinessObjects Mobile and Explorer apps. 
• However, this issue with this is these apps are not a direct replacement for running Dashboard reports. Nor are they available for all mobile devices.
• Moreover, we aren't thrilled about having to force our users to download apps. The goal again is to simply allow a user open a browser (e.g. Safari on an iOS device), browse to our SharePoint site and view any of the SAP BO reports (using IOMS). 

SAP recently outlined their mobile strategy and announced SAP Dashboards will support HTML5 sometime in 2012.  However, we are curious to see how buggy the HTML5 release will be and if it will support all the existing features of Flash-based dashboards. You can view the announcement here.

So at this point our options are:

• Using SharePoint Performance Point for Dashboards rather than BO Dashboards.
• Using a mobile enterprise application solution such as Sybase's Unwired Platform.
• Waiting for SAP Dashboards to support HTML5.
• Building all our dashboards and reports using WebI and Crystal.

A Journey using SharePoint 2010 and SAP BusinessObjects 4.x

Recently we've spun up a project to explore migrating all our public and private reports to a new SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) 4.x environment. The portal site to deliver the reports will be SharePoint 2010. The reports will be used by the general public and privately by users through a SharePoint-based extranet.

We plan on using the full gamut of BO BI reporting capabilities including WebI, Crystal, Dashboard (Xcelsius), QaaWS, all underpinned by Universes. Our existing Oracle RAC data warehouse will be the source for all reports, with operational databases feeding the data warehouse in near real time using a combination of PL/SQL ETL and SAP BusinessObjects Data Services 4.x ETL.

Over the next few months I hope to blog on some of the benefits and challenges of this project. In particular, gluing these technologies together. If you have a similar project or have some experience using this same technology stack, I would love to hear from you.

VMware changes its licensing model (and not for the better)

Yesterday VMware announced the release of vSphere 5. Some great new features were announced (Storage DRS for one). But included in the announcement was a change to their licensing model. Under vSphere 5, VMware editions are licensed on a per CPU socket (not core) basis and pooled virtual RAM (vRAM). I applaud any changes that bring licensing models closer to the way public/private cloud chargeback models work. But digging into the licensing model revealed some nasty surprises. At the company I work for, the change effectively increases our VMware licensing costs by 33%.

Here's how it shakes down for us. Our standard VMware ESX is a blade server consisting of 2 CPUs with 6 cores each (12 cores total), and 128GB RAM. Most of our applications, like many other companies, are memory intensive and not CPU intensive. Our standard is to license each blade with VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus edition.

Under the new licensing model, purchasing a 1 socket license of Enterprise Plus entitles to you 48GB of vRAM to allocate to VMs. VMware makes no mention of being able to purchase vRAM entitlements without purchasing the socket license. So in our scenario, we'll have to purchase a 3 socket Enterprise Plus license for our 2 socket blade server in order to use all 128GB of physical RAM.

3 socket license entitles us to 144GB RAM (3 x 48GB)
2 socket license entitles us to 96 GB RAM (2 x 48GB)

Further with the 3 socket license, now we are over entitled on the vRAM, meaning we essentially licensed more vRAM (144GB) than we have physically installed on the blade (128GB). If we had gone with the 2 socket license, we would have under licensed the vRAM (96GB) verses the physical RAM (128GB) and wasted installed RAM.

Now VMware counters that vRAM entitlments are pooled across a cluster (provided all cluster nodes are running the same edition of vSphere e.g. Enterprise Plus). Yes, I like that but it still doesn't solve my problem of this low 48GB vRAM entitlement with Enterprise Plus.

So based on our current blade configuration our licensing costs have increased by 33%. Multiply that across a 36 blade VMware cluster, and the cost increase becomes very serious. Serious enough to have me revisit Gartner's 2011 Virtualization Magic quadrant and re-evaluate VMware as the virtualization platform for the organization. Alternatively, we'll have to reconsider our standard blade server configuration to find a more optimal balance between sockets and installed RAM.

To rub salt in the wound, as of Aug 12, VMware will no longer be selling vSphere 4.1 licenses, only vSphere 5. However, vSphere 5 licenses do come with downgrade rights to vSphere 4.

A quick check on Twitter (#vmwlicensing) shows many VMware users are up in arms over this change. Let's hope by the time VMworld 2011 happens, VMware has reconsidered vRAM entitlement thresholds, or perhaps offers vRAM to be purchased/licensed a la carte.

You can read about the new vSphere 5 licensing model here.

VMware acquires SocialCast - another steps towards competing with Office365

I mentioned in a previous blog post I believe VMware is building (rather acquiring) an Office365 competitive offering as they move from being an IaaS vendor to a PaaS and SaaS vendor. Today VMware announced their acquisition of SocialCast, an enterprise collaboration tool. SocialCast is offered as on premise, private cloud or SaaS.

I liken SocialCast to Office365's SharePoint offering, but with notable differences such as CRM and ERP integration. So in my mind here's where VMware is at today.

Outlook/Exchange = Zimbra
SharePoint = SocialCast
PowerPoint = SlideRocket
Word = ??? TBD
Excel = ??? TBD

I am over generalizing the comparisions but you get the idea. Any bets on what the future VMware acquisitions will be? Perhaps a Word and Excel equivalent? I would also bet that VMware is looking at porting these applications to CloudFoundry and building a future product/brand offering around them, along with requisite management tools.

New NetApp CommVault OEM Relationship

Today NetApp and CommVault announced an OEM relationship whereby CommVault will integrate with NetApp's snapshot technology. The new NetApp SnapProtect product uses CommVault Simpana to add traditional backup and restore capabilities to NetApp's snapshot technologies (SnapManager, SnapMirror, SnapVault). NetApp SnapProtect provides a single management framework for managing NetApp snapshots, SnapMirror, SnapVault and backup schedules. In the past managing NetApp snapshots and host backup required separate processes and tools. Administrators needed to manually keep track of overlap and scheduling between the tools.

The other benefit is driving the traditional backup to tape process off the host or virtual machine to the storage array level, and utilize snapshots. Using SnapProtect, CommVault can restore of individual files, provide data classification and snapshot management through the SnapProtect framework.

Press release: http://www.netapp.com/us/company/news/news-rel-20110531-291587.html

VMware Cloud Foundry shakes up the PaaS model

With VMware’s release of Cloud Foundry it seems the momentum continues towards PaaS and SaaS. This is backed by the recent Forrester report "Sizing the Cloud" which shows the future revenue largely in SaaS, followed by PaaS. The following graphic depicts where the major vendors are at with their IaaS, PaaS and SaaS offerings.

What makes VMware’s Cloud Foundry interesting is for those who design and build private clouds. Up to this point anyone building a private internal cloud could only emulate an IaaS offering whereby the applications group could self provision virtual machines equipped with compute resources, an operating system and storage. But this still left the burden of installing and deploying the application layer, and the app itself, on the applications group.

If an organization wanted to offer a PaaS in their private cloud, they were essentially out of luck. In 2010 Microsoft did release an Azure Appliance to allow organizations to build their own internal Azure-based PaaS. However the Azure Appliance is largely targeted at very large service providers.

With the public cloud, picking a PaaS provider meant vendor lock in. Build an app for Azure and forget about moving it to Amazon AWS.

But Cloud Foundry looks to change this. First, companies with private clouds will be able to run the Cloud Foundry PaaS. Theoretically even private clouds build on Hyper-V (rather than VMware vSphere) could run Cloud Foundry. Second, if you build an app and deploy it to Cloud Foundry on the public cloud you aren’t locked in. If you find your vendor isn’t meeting their SLA on a routine basis, simply redeploy the app to Cloud Foundry running in your private cloud or to another public cloud provider running Cloud Foundry.

Looking forward I see a few interesting things happening:

• Most large organizations that are building private clouds and IaaS are not using Hyper–V for server virtualization. They are using VMware vSphere and vCloud (in addition to storage and network virtualization and other components that make up a private cloud). Therefore, my feeling is VMware customers will most likely adopt Cloud Foundry over the Azure Appliance.
• VMware’s decision to open source Cloud Foundry will allow it grow and mature quickly. For example, existing languages such as PHP will be quickly supported. Only Spring for Java applications, Rails and Sinatra for Ruby apps, and Node.js apps are currently supported.
• Cloud Foundry will appeal most to companies not using Microsoft development tools and environments.

While the release of Cloud Foundry may warrant adding it to your organization’s long term enterprise application architecture roadmap few, if any, organizations will entertain bringing it into their private clouds in the near term. The main reason for this is most organizations are still in the process of building out their private clouds and getting a handle on all the orchestration and management tools needed to deliver it and chargeback models needed to economically support it.