Collaborate 14 - reflections

Sorry this is a little latter to publish than I wanted.  It has been a very busy month with lots of travel.  

Another year of Collaborate has passed, yet again I meet many new people.  Experienced great in person learning from the experts spanning the fields of engineered systems, database, PL/SQL development, cloud, and more.  It was a great week, and a big thank you to all the speakers, volunteers, and staff that helped make everything work so well.  Thanks to everyone at IOUG!

I'd like to say thank you to everyone that attended my session on infrastructure architecture, session 507 "You Bet Your Datacenter".  We had a great participation from our in-person and on-line audiences.  Without you, this session never could have worked.  Of course, the session would have been nothing without the panel members, my extreme gratitude goes out to Tariq Farooq, Kirby McCord, Arup Nanda, and Kai Yu.

So for those of you that missed the session, the goal was to have a high level conversation about infrastructure architecture.  Daily in our jobs we are influenced if not dictated by the infrastructure and architecture choices made by our organizations.  Some of these are strategic decisions, some are living with history. 

Since it is hard to abstract these discussions from our day to day realities, I created an artificial company that was used for our discussion, and our panel played four possible Chief Technology Officer (CTO) with different plans for the company.

Out CTO's had a mixture of engineered systems, virtualization and external cloud.  Although these sound simple, common, maybe guessable?  But the reality is much more complex.  Our CTO's all had virtual servers, some utilizing commodity hardware, others using purely engineered systems.   Some pushed heavily into externally hosted applications, but all had moved to externally hosted basic services like email.  Three of the CTO's kept all databases separate on either engineered systems or non-virtualized commodity hardware.

So what did our attendees want to discuss?  Lots of great questions.

Is cloud model sustainable over time, vs one time cash infusion?

Our fake company was going through a major change, a one time cash infusion to completely remake the IT infrastructure from legacy systems.  Externally hosted cloud is a on-going monthly cost, basically for the life of the company.  The short answer is that financial models for the company have to take this into account.  Internal hardware is generally purchased or leased, but either way there is a known cost with a beginning and a end.  Hosted applications have a continuous cost, in fact they can have a variable cost if you are paying by utilization.  This is not a good or bad thing, it's just a realization that traditional IT cost models probably need to adjust.

How do you take cost out with your model?

Most companies have ups and downs, there will be times when you will have to adjust your budget.  This is never easy, can purchased hardware just be returned?  Ending leases early is not always a great answer for multiple reasons.  For those heavily invested in external hosting, you may have fixed contract costs that can not be easily modified.  Closely watching contract terms and working with vendors including hosting companies, hardware vendors, even leasing companies is critical to costs.

How long will implementation take?

Yet another amazing question, and far from an easy one.  There is a lot of discussion about how much time it takes to bring hardware into a data center, or how quickly a cloud vendor can bring a system online.  Our panel took a good look at this question and come back with the reality that change in the company takes time.  Retraining the workforce, both in IT and the users of the systems where needed.  Migrating systems from old hardware to new, or possibly moving the data from internal to external systems.  Integrating systems, possibly connecting multiple external vendors to each other, or to internal systems.  After some good back and forth everyone seemed to agree that at least a year would be required.

What about competition between vendors and integration with cloud vendors?

This topic came up a few times in different guises and with different intentions.  First, how do you integrate between internal systems and externally hosted systems in the cloud.  Depending on what applications are internally hosted and eternally hosted this can get very complex or even costly due to telecommunication charges.  Second to this topic is if applications are hosted at multiple external vendors or clouds.  Then you have to deal with integration's across vendors, and may run into even more telecommunications costs or headaches.  Finally, what if the decision is made to migrate from one cloud vendor to another?  How do you transfer your system?  Will you have to re-architect it?  Unfortunately the cloud era is still pretty young to have many answers to these questions, but the CTO panel was split on their answers.  Some focused on the need to stay with internal systems that eliminate some of these concerns, while others noted that these concerns are being addressed and as the industry matures these concerns will be resolved.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention one CTO's heartfelt push towards both cloud and engineered systems.  Pointing towards the head winds of the market.  As he stated, the trends at least for now all point towards a heavy shift to could based externally hosted systems and specialized pre engineered infrastructure both in the virtualization spaces and data management spaces.  On that front I must agree, as history of IT has shown us change is rapid.  Identifying true winners and losers in IT trends is almost impossible.  Having knowledgeable, impassioned, and talented people is always the best way to make technical trends into business realities.  Thanks again to everyone that participated in our session, and the amazing panel.

Hope to see you next year at Collaborate 15!