The project, in a presentation by Frank Frankovsy at Interop, said it was taking a slightly different tack with its design, deciding to get input from others before actually making and releasing the hardware to the community. However, just because the hardware isn’t designed yet, Facebook isn’t going to twiddle its thumbs for a traditional multi-year design cycle. Frankovsky told me in an interview that he expects the hardware to b out in 9 to 12 months.

“We have built these islands of openness in the data center but the last element, and the one that was connecting the compute and storage, was the network,” said Frankovsky. “And there is a lot of pent-up passion out there for breaking open this appliance model.”

Networking is the last bastion of proprietary profits

Prepare to be disaggregated, switch!

For those who don’t dwell in data centers, the top-of-rack switch is the networking gear that sits on the top of a rack of servers directing traffic between those boxes and between the other racks in the data center. While the networking world is all aflutter over the promise of OpenFlow and software-defined networking, very little real progress has been made in building switches for the webscale data center.

Google, a few years back, had famously issued a request for a new type of switch that would fit its very specific scaled-out needs and no one responded. Now the search giant makes its own hardware. But soon after that, Andy Bechtolsheim saw the need for Google-like speeds and scale and started Arista, a switch company that has dominated in the webscale, financial and high-performance switching space. Meanwhile, at the lower end, Cisco’s cheaper Nexus line of switches have done really well.

Facebook’s Najam Ahmad.

Yet, these options aren’t palatable for Frankovsky or Najam Ahmad of Facebook (Ahmad will be at our Structure conference in June discussing more about Facebook’s networking strategy). On the existing product side, Frankovsky is frustrated by hardware that doesn’t play nicely at scale. He specifically mentioned that the side venting of heat on switches means he can’t place them right next to another switch. Ahmad, who is in charge of the social-networking giant’s network, is concerned about getting out of the proprietary OS model.

“We want it to be OS-agnostic so we can use one from our existing provider or build our own,” he said. He added that he’d prefer an open Linux-based implementation. These proprietary OSes — Cisco has IOS, Juniper has Junos and Arista has EOS — are one of the reasons that companies are locked into one networking gear provider. They are also stuck using proprietary code to make changes.

Who will be the Red Hat of the networking OS?

Networking cables along the ceiling at Facebook HQ.

If you are chock full of technically savvy people, losing the agility that comes from writing your own code as well as paying higher prices for the proprietary hardware and software combination is probably maddening. Hence Facebook’s interest in the open source OS. Of course, building out the underlying hardware is only the first step, the next will be supporting an OS that runs on top of that system.

While Facebook might build its own OS, not every company will want to do that, and Facebook may not open source its own networking OS if it ever makes one. That leaves a market opportunity. Perhaps a firm like Arista might move in here with an open source version of EOS, although given that Arista uses merchant silicon in its boxes, putting up an open-source version of its software would eat into its margins.

This is neither Open Flow nor SDN

But let’s go back to the box. Facebook is working with Broadcom, Intel, The Open Daylight Foundation, the Open Networking Foundation and Big Switch as some of its collaborators on this project. The box itself might run x86 hardware or a proprietary ASIC, according to Frankovsky. As for the protocols, Open Compute is going to see what the other collaborators want.

Software-defined networking

But for those wondering about Open Flow support, it’s likely. Frankovsky said that the Open Networking Foundation asked Facebook to get involved via the Open Compute Project with making open networking hardware. While Frankovsky and Ahmad didn’t cop to it, I know there has been frustration in many areas of the webscale and networking world that the promise of commodity hardware that Open Flow could offer has not really hit the market in a way that offers the most flexibility for data center operators.

Frankovsky said that the ONF approached Open Compute (Facebook is a founding member of both organizations) in part because it believed it could move quickly on this. And it will. But it’s worth noting that this announcement is about an open source top-of-rack switch, not a controller and not some type of software-defined networking play.

Other companies may take this box and perhaps an open source OS if one is developed, and then layer on some type of controller software to make a software-defined network, but this is just a box.

That being said, this is a box that could seriously disrupt the existing players in networking, from giants like Cisco and Dell all the way to smaller startups like NoviFlow or even Pica8. Much like Facebook is changing the server market with Open Compute, we’ll see if it can tweak the model and do the same in networking.

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Good bye to Philips yellow, groove-laden LED bulb.

Lighting giant Philips says it’ll start selling a newly designed LED bulb in the new year that actually looks like a normal light bulb. Philips’ current LED bulb that can replace a standard 60 watt incandescent bulb is bright yellow and has silver grooves lining it (see left). Philips will start selling its new white LED home bulb (that doesn’t have those grooves) starting in 2013 at Home Depot stores (see right).

Philips says due to a new air cooling technology that it’s developed called AirFlux, the company was able to eliminate the silver grooves (called heat sink fins) on the former bulb. The company also ditched the bright yellow color, which I always found a little off putting.

Philips’ newly designed normal-looking LED bulb

The new “normal” bulb will cost $25 — which isn’t bad in the LED world — and at launch time interested customers can get $5 off that sticker price. The new bulb is also more energy efficient than the old one.

LEDs are continuing to drop in price and become more mainstream for both industrial and commercial sectors, as well as residential homes. According to GigaOM Pro and Pike Research, by 2020 LEDs will make up nearly half (46 percent) of the $4.4 billion U.S. commercial lamp market.

Startups are also making some headway in the LED market. GE recently bought a startup called Albeo, which makes LED fixtures and platforms. I’ve been testing out the liquid-cooled LED bulb by Switch.

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Customers have come to understand the potential of having an agile IT environment, but by and large most of them don’t fully understand what that means for their current IT model or organization and legacy environments. I fear that we are heading to a point in the next 12 months where we will see a strong customer backlash in the form of brake lights or return to sender notes.

If your solution can stand the light of day, then you shouldn’t have any trouble helping your potential customers better understand what the adoption of said technology, when done correctly, might mean. You must be willing to make it clear that buying an engine, even a really good one, isn’t buying a car. If we continue to sell engines to mechanics, we must give them the knowledge to build the car. We at least need to help them understand that the engine alone isn’t enough. They need the rest of the car.

Here be dragons

There are several challenges I see developing in this marketplace that will help fuel the backlash such as:

• Too many vendors who are all trying to gain a foothold before the money runs out or the customer gets wiser, whichever comes first
• Vendors and service providers that really don’t understand corporate IT and can’t explain in strategic terms how cloud will and should affect the IT group and enable the business at large

There is more to building an agile or fluid IT environment that just creating faster provisioning and or reducing your capex spend and replacing much of it with operational expenditures

• Confusing messages about what is or isn’t a cloud
• Large, big box players are attempting to demonstrate their relevance in the new cloudier markets
• A clear understanding of the links between agile infrastructure and process or organizational change requirements is missing

The challenges here among others lead to a lack of understanding among buyers who then either don’t buy or buy without thinking through the downstream impacts or roadblocks to realizing real benefits.

Help your customer to help yourself

So how to avoid the backlash? Remember that you aren’t selling disk, CPU, or a piece of software anymore. You’re selling a strategic opportunity to your customers and you need to staff up accordingly. Your team needs experience with organizational design and a greater understanding of what business trigger is better advanced by an agile IT environment.

You also need to incent the sales team correctly. Most sales organizations don’t emphasize a long-term strategic customer focus, but rather the effort is on “how much can I sell in the shortest sales cycle or by quarter end”. This tactic for sales might work in the short term, but won’t make you any long-term friends.

Create sales and consulting strategies that take into account the “two ITs” that will continue to exist for the next 7-10 years. A sale to a startup or small business will be very different from a sale to a large established business or an enterprise. The small business doesn’t have the legacy process, infrastructure, and staffing, so their ability to quickly adopt and realize the benefit of agile IT is more obvious. With an enterprise the wrong adoption process will get the CIO fired and could put the business at risk. Doing things more quickly is great, but only if you have the people and process to guarantee that the ‘”correct” things are happening quickly.

Finally, look for the right partners and don’t try to be everything to all people. While most would agree that Amazon has the most feature-rich cloud solution, it offers little if anything in the form of support for how your organization should adopt and integrate agile IT. Other IT team incentives and strategies for making the agile IT change in your organization can be found here.

We read it in every guide for sales and business relationships, “the supplier needs to act as a partner”. If you’re acting as a partner to your agile IT buyer, then you should participate in preparing them to be successful. In no part of the IT market is this any more important than in the cloud space.

Customers must act too.

And customers, I’m not letting you off the hook either. Stop looking at cloud as the “why” and start looking at how an agile IT environment will allow you to deliver greater business value to your customer “whys”. Engage your service provider partner in discussions at the correct levels of leadership (on both sides). Identify third parties that can add value to the mix. In other words, don’t be afraid to ask for help.

This isn’t just a new set of hardware, it’s a change in mindset about how IT serves the business. If we want people to buy into that, we have to educate them, support them and tell them the truth. Then maybe we can avoid this trough of disillusionment.

Mark Thiele is executive VP of Data Center Tech at Switch, the operator of the SuperNAP data center in Las Vegas. Thiele blogs at SwitchScribe and at Data Center Pulse, where is also president and founder. He can be found on Twitter at @mthiele10.

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But still as IKEA points out LED lighting consumes 85 percent less energy than incandescent lighting, and lasts 20 times longer.So-called light emitting diodes are semiconductors that emit light, so LED lighting can basically turn lighting digital.

IKEA has long been aggressive when it comes to sustainability. IKEA has phased out plastic bags, and has also been putting solar on the roofs of its stores, and now is the company with the 4th most solar capacity in the U.S.

In IKEA’s announcement, they included a survey on LEDs, and it’s clear that people aren’t necessarily all that educated on the benefits of LEDs — well, at least Americans:

• Less than one-half of Americans (43 percent) have at least one LED bulb in their house compared to China (80 percent), Russia (65 percent) and Sweden (61 percent).
• Only 27 percent of people know that these bulbs last 20 years.
• Only one-third (34 percent) of Americans say LED lights provide similar lighting quality to incandescent bulbs, compared to China (77 percent) and Russia (61 percent).

Startups that are innovating around interesting LED technology includeDigital Lumens, Switch, and BridgeLux.

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So what are they?

• Public cloud – The only “real” cloud as someone like Werner Vogel of Amazon would say
• Private cloud – An on-site or hosted private cloud-capable environment
• Actual cloud -The set of strategies, processes, people and technologies that enable business agility, improved resource management, and faster time to market (among other things). The actual cloud is the real world amalgamation that users end up with and may consist of both or one of the above.

As the idea for this blog was first racing through my mind thought getting feedback on the term cloud from some of my friends would be a great way to further illuminate the disparity of thought on the subject of cloud. As you can see from the tweets and quotes below, each has their own take on the idea of “what is cloud, really?”

Joe Weinman, a SVP at Telx and author of the just-released Cloudonomics defines “cloud” via a retronym: C.L.O.U.D.: a Common, Location-independent, Online, Utility, on-Demand service. He argues that each of these properties generates statistically quantifiable economic value; for example, common resources lead to increased utilization when demands are independent. Such approaches, he argues, provide a sounder basis for cloud decision-making than hand waving.

Others were less scientific, such as Simon Wardley a lead researcher at the Leading Edge Forum, who tweeted: “IMHO – Cloud is a muppet marketing term used to window dress computer utilities as something else so other muppets pay more”

False arguments on both sides of what cloud is or isn’t

The cloud industry benefits from you as the customer being confused by the noise. Each side of the cloud debate is trying to work on your fears that you might be buying into something that’s not secure, will cost too much, or will lock you in etc. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t real cloudwashing going on, but this is where as the customer you need to be clear about what the objectives are. If what you’re buying meets or exceeds them, then it’s good enough. So you can safely ignore the following false arguments:

• Private cloud isn’t real because it can’t possibly be as cost-effective as a public utility type offering such as those from Rackspace, HP, Microsoft, Amazon, Profitbricks, Zumaysys, etc.
• Public cloud is not secure enough
• Private cloud will never scale infinitely and therefore isn’t really cloud
• Public cloud is more expensive
• Private cloud is just a stack of stuff being sold to you by the big vendors
• Public cloud isn’t dependable
• Private cloud software isn’t mature enough
• Public cloud will lock you in to a provider
• Private cloud is just more hardware and software lock in

While all of the above statements are “false” in the right context, they can be true in others. The sad truth is that it’s definitely a caveat emptor market for the cloud service/solution buyer.

Why the what doesn’t matter

When someone aks, “What cloud are you using?”, “Who cares,” should be the answer. What’s important is what you’re doing, not what you used to do it. We’ve been subjected to alternate technologies at every layer of the IT stack for the last 30 years, yet strangely we’re not all on one OS, one storage type, one middleware solution, or one database. As I’ve stated before, IT by its very nature provides us with a painter’s palette of opportunities. What’s important is how you utilize that pallet, not whether you use a specific type of paint.

The correct question should be how are you creating opportunity, or how are you enabling agility. In general the least important addition to your operational model should be the technologies you’ve added. If you’ve added the technology pieces, but haven’t changed your operation model and realigned your business and IT staff, then the tech just doesn’t matter. If you built a cloud based on Captain Crunch and bailing wire, then great, you’ve got a cloud, as long as it’s solving the problems you needed solved and enabling the agility and opportunity you expected. The why of the activity should always be the most important point, because it will drive the how.

Chose the actual cloud

When you’ve created a cloud oriented organizational model, then the technology that supports it is but an enabler. If you can solve the problem most effectively by cobbling something together yourself with all commodity and opensource then you should. However, if you can reach your objectives more quickly or cost effectively by buying a pre-packaged “cloud” offering or using a global public cloud service, then that’s where you should go. The trick is the organizational design. Without proper design you will fail the why process and you’ll be forever fighting ownership disease. And ownership disease can stall or even kill some of your best opportunities because someone’s comfort or skill is being accommodated at a higher priority than the business opportunity.

So get off the cloud bandwagon and get on the actual cloud thought process. Consider what opportunities you’re trying to create and evaluate your cloud or infrastructure solution options based on best fit, as you would with any IT solution. Many of us like to go on for hours about what the pure cloud is supposed to be, but it’s just not an important argument. As long as you have a clear sense of what the technology solution you’re selecting can enable, and it satisfies your requirements, then don’t wait for someone to call it a real cloud, just start using it.

Mark Thiele is executive VP of Data Center Tech at Switch, the operator of the SuperNAP data center in Las Vegas. Thiele blogs at SwitchScribe and at Data Center Pulse, where is also president and founder. He can be found on Twitter at @mthiele10.

Cup image courtesy of Shutterstock user Levent Konuck. Palette image courtesy of Flickr user Sultry: New in New Hampshire!

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Charles Dickens (who may be rolling in his grave) was right. When it comes to the debate on public versus private clouds or commodity versus legacy IT, there seems to be no room for nuance. So, while cloud and commodity IT are the way of the future, private Cloud and legacy IT are here to stay.

Underlying IT strategy considerations (What’s good for you)

Cloud computing is supposed to save us money, and most would argue that it can. Cloud computing is also supposed to provide agility and flexibility in how you deploy and manage your IT solutions, enabling improved business capabilities. The problem is that depending on what you’re doing and when you’re doing it, saving money could be the only reason for adopting or not a reason at all.

If savings was the motivation for moving services to the cloud I might argue that depending on the depth and breadth of adoption you could be using the wrong decision drivers. In other words, how often are major shifts in IT done with savings in IT as the “why”? Savings is the outcome of the “why.”

Personally, I always look for ways to make IT more cost effective and efficient, but not at the expense of real progress. If you’re spending your time focused on cost savings and efficiency as the why then you’re likely missing greater opportunities for adding business value. As I’ve said before, you must get away from thinking of IT as a tool to use to reduce the cost of IT.

How to know if the public cloud is your best bet.

• Limited exposure to heavy infrastructure investments like mainframes and enterprise applications
• IT staff are more likely to have been brought up in the days of rapid development, virtualization automation and services on demand
• More accepting of risk to availability or supportability of your environments (more open to “open source”)
• In a smaller business there tends to be greater flexibility and agility in decision making
• Enterprises that have new application requirements should look at all options (SaaS, Public Cloud, Private Cloud, etc.). Time to market, skills and costs should be the deciding factor, not dogma.
• The above characteristics lend themselves to allowing a company to go whole hog into a new IT strategy and to accept risks where more established enterprises can’t or won’t. Generally smaller companies and younger companies will take this risk.
• The staff is much less likely to feel emotional attachment to a SAN or to working on servers and are therefore less likely to feel threatened by looking to an external provider.

So who wants to stick with private cloud?

• Companies with a decade plus of investment in IT staff, infrastructure and enterprise applications
• Those in industries where regulatory and financial controls are stricter, more comprehensive and carry greater risk when failure occurs
• CIOs working at places where business change takes much longer and acceptance for risk to the status quo is much lower
• Places that have dedicated staffing for very specific roles, which makes it harder to unify quickly around a major change to infrastructure or applications
• Businesses with a much larger infrastructure base, allowing for deeper staff knowledge and improved economies of scale

The characteristics of a large enterprise mean that many investments in IT have consequences that are measured in the $100s of millions. Any short term investment in hardware or private cloud solutions is immaterial to the greater opportunity for the company. This doesn’t mean that a large enterprise can’t or shouldn’t look to use public cloud where it makes sense, but it does mean that they don’t have to in order to be competitive. In the end, very few companies will ever fail because their infrastructure cost area little higher. However, they could fail if their infrastructure doesn’t protect the business or respond appropriately to need.

Your mileage may vary

Enterprises can’t and won’t just dump expensive and critical legacy environments so they can move something to public or private cloud. Smaller businesses can now adopt technologies, applications and distributed infrastructure in ways that were formerly only available to much larger organizations. We will have a noisy cloud technology market for some time to come and the split of cloud computing models means that there will be room for everyone.

So depending on where you sit the market could look great or scary. It could look like it’s not really changing for the better, or it could look like it’s moving too fast. However, the fact is that change to a cloud operating model is happening and competition will be the deciding factor. Companies will adopt those strategies that offer them the best combination of agility, and cost, while appropriately addressing their level of risk tolerance.

Mark Thiele is executive VP of Data Center Tech at Switch, the operator of the SuperNAP data center in Las Vegas. Thiele blogs at SwitchScribe and at Data Center Pulse, where is also president and founder. He can be found on Twitter at @mthiele10.

Feature photo courtesy of  Flickr user piermario; Server photo courtesy of Flickr user Paul Hammond; Odometer photo courtesy of Flickr user  quasireversible.

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(L to R) Kevin Timmons, CTO, CyrusOne; Jason Mendenhall, EVP, Cloud, Switch; Scott Davis, EVP, Data Center Operations, DuPont Fabros Technology; Tate Cantrell, CTO, Verne Global
(c)2012 Pinar Ozger pinar@pinarozger.com

In a world where data centers can be built on massive sites in rural North Carolina, in modular pods dropped down in Las Vegas, or in renewable energy-powered countries like Iceland, data center operators have a lot of options. Many are looking to differentiate themselves on efficiency and geography, says Kevin Timmons, the CTO of co-location data center operator CyrusOne, at GigaOM’s Structure event on Thursday.

Energy efficiency might not have been so important in the past, said Timmons, but that’s increasingly changing as the customer sees they can write a smaller check for using less power. Tate Cantrell, CTO of Verne Global, which built a data center in Iceland that runs completely on the country’s hydro and geothermal power, says renewable energy is also becoming an increasingly important factor in deciding where to build data centers.

Cantrell sees a world where the data and processing move to where the low cost clean power is. “I envision data centers being built in deserts next to giant solar farms, and it’s this crowd that can deliver the innovation needed to make that happen,” said Cantrell, referring to the Structure audience.

The typical enterprise customer might not be ready for all of these new features, says Timmons. A fast-growing enterprise is about four years behind the Facebooks, Microsofts, and Yahoos of the world, he said. There’s still a need for some legacy architecture, and it’s about getting efficiencies from yesterday’s infrastructure, said Jason Mendenhall, EVP of Cloud, Switch, which built a massive data center in Las Vegas.

Increasingly data center operators are having to look at the big picture, which includes power and water and location. Facilities managers would previously start taking over when we data center architecture and design was needed, but now these types of efficiency constraints are being baked into the design of the hardware itself, said Mendenhall. The Switch data center has four different, patented dynamic ways to cool itself where the site chooses the most efficient method of cooling at any one time.

Check out the rest of our Structure 2012 coverage, as well as the live stream, here.

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Cloud providers are happy to tell you they have a magic bean that you can install, and “Boom!” you’re cloudified and you need look no further for additional options in terms of providers. So you gently place all your eggs in one cloud basket, then go home and pet your Unicorn while sprinkling pixie dust all around.

Sure, there are myriad solutions available today that individually can solve some of your application requirements such as Joyent, Amazon, Rackspace, VMware, HP, CloudSigma, CloudProviders, etc. However, I haven’t heard any of these providers working on distributing your cloud risk across other solutions. They have choices for hybrid clouds, or public & private blends, but when they talk risk avoidance, it’s the same cloud, with an additional location. To be fair, I don’t blame the providers, it’s up to us as customers to ensure we’ve effectively managed the risk for our business. You can’t lay that responsibility on a vendor.

One cloud – Not even a distributed one?

There are inherent risks with putting all your eggs in one basket, regardless of the elegance or marketing of that basket. Any single technology platform brings with it the risk that a single platform specific issue could adversely affect the whole. I’ve seen too many problems occur in production, even after successful testing, and the reality is that in most cases you just can’t test against every potential environment or use scenario. So, yes the risk remains, regardless of zoning or regional distribution. As the saying goes, the strength of a chain is dependent on the weakest link.

As you develop your technology ecosystem and what I like to call your Fluid IT operating model, you should be creating a strategy for adopting and using multiple cloud platforms, in part to help you reduce your single supplier risk. However, reducing risk of an outage isn’t the only reason you should look for a multi-cloud solution. There’s also the assumption that if you’ve developed an environment that allows you to utilize multiple clouds, you are enriching your ecosystem, and are likely better allocating your workloads and using geographic diversity to better serve your customer.

Sounds great, but how can I manage multiple clouds?

As mentioned in the Fluid IT blog the ability to absorb new technologies and platforms seamlessly is critical. It’s important to note that the faster you can provision critical infrastructure, the faster you can get yourself and your business in trouble, which is why a strong management platform is so critical.

How many of us in IT have built “test” environments for an applications team only to find they’ve been pushed into production without any oversight, governance, change management or even IP address updates? Now, consider how wrong things could go in a cloud environment where there’s no governance, oversight, etc. in place to assist in the process of moving apps from a test environment to production. All clouds need a strong management platform that helps automate and manage specific aspects of a code deployments.

And when it comes to trying to spread an application or several applications across multiple clouds, the need for a strong management platform becomes even more crucial. If the lack of widespread management tools gives you the shivers, realize that the other alternative is to keep everything manual and turn your rapid deployment infrastructure into a Ferrari stuck in traffic. Yes, the car is fast, but it doesn’t matter when stuck on the 101 during rush hour.

So, no, you shouldn’t be on just one cloud, but you also shouldn’t be on any cloud(s) using weak management tools, or worse attempting to do your policy, governance, change management and capacity planning by hand.

Is it really worth it?

There are myriad benefits to being able to use clouds from several different providers, such as reduced risk, having access to the right infrastructure for the right workloads, getting the best price for jobs, and optimizing distribution to address latency concerns. However, there isn’t a simple answer to adopting multiple clouds for any individual workload. That effort will take time and hard work. So, even if your first goal is just to distribute your risk by application, not across applications, you’ll still be better off by hiring a bunny (cloud management) that can manage several baskets using the same controls, governance and policy. Then work through the bunny to distribute your eggs (workloads) across baskets (clouds).

Mark Thiele is executive VP of Data Center Tech at Switch, the operator of the SuperNAP data center in Las Vegas. Thiele blogs at SwitchScribe and at Data Center Pulse, where is also president and founder. He can be found on Twitter at @mthiele10.

Image courtesy of Flickr user ralieghwoman.

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