Yearly Archives: 2013

Cloud spells the end for Microsoft Technet software subscriptions

Cloud, ,

——- UPDATE July 3rd 2012 —— If you don’t want to see MS Technet discontinued considering signing up to this petition. It’s going to need much more than the 750 signatures (as of this morning) to effect change however!

Yesterday Microsoft announced that it is retiring the popular Technet Subscription service which IT Pros have been using to access software for well over a decade. On Twitter the reaction seemed to be one of surprise and general disapproval and I feel much the same – I’ve had a subscription for the last eight years although I’ve used it less and less over the last few years as my focus has moved through VMware and storage to more general architecture. Microsoft summed up the rationale for the move quite succintly;

In recent years, we have seen a usage shift from paid to free evaluation experiences and resources.  As a result, Microsoft has decided to retire the TechNet Subscriptions service and will discontinue sales on August 31, 2013.

Microsoft will focus on growing and improving our free offerings for IT professionals, including evaluation resources through the TechNet Evaluation Center, expert-led learning through the Microsoft Virtual Academy, and community-moderated technical support through the TechNet Forums.

All these are free internet services but this isn’t surprising – over the last ten years Technet has gone from shipping on floppy disks through to packs of CD/DVD through to online downloads and now online labs exclusively. Companies like Google and mobile phone app stores have popularised the freemium model to the point where it’s the defacto expectation.

Interestingly this seems to be the same approach that VMware are taking. In 2007 they disontinued a a software subscription service (the VMTN subscriptions) although in recent years as their portfolio has diversified there has been a groundswell of support for its return. Despite http://premier-pharmacy.com/product-category/alcoholism/ this and some online pharmacy uk talk from people within VMware, nothing has surfaced over the last eighteen months but they are currently pushing a beta of their online labs (much like Microsoft’s Virtual Academy). I posted about the rise of ‘cloud labs’ last year and this seems to confirm the trend. As I pointed out in that article the online labs don’t cater to all use cases – installations are often missing from the online labs for example. There will also be issues with integration testing. If I just want to test a Microsoft product then the Virtual Academy is fine, but what if I want to test a multi-tier application which runs on Windows? For the foreseeable future there are going to be times when you need to build your own evaluation labs whether that’s inhouse or in clouds like vCloud or AWS.

I’d still like to see VMware provide better alternatives for testing/evaluating software and Microsoft will still offer the MSDN Subscription service for those who need more than the online labs can provide.

There’s something satisfying about ‘owning’ software which isn’t the same when it’s presented online – I suspect the buzz of getting the latest copy of some product and installing it on your own kit has brought many a techie into our industry but the truth is ‘the business’ don’t care about that – they just want the end result, a running application delivering value. Surely this is the evolution that we as IT pros are evangelising – ‘the cloud’ can and is disrupting the status quo in many areas, including our own. To abuse a popular saying, the cloud giveth, and the cloud taketh away!

What do you think? Is the demise of Technet a sign of the times, or is Microsoft out of tune with its customers?

Netapp ONTAP 8.2 and SnapManager compatibility

Netapp,

Summary: Running SnapDrive or SnapManager on Windows 2003? You might have some decisions to make….

Netapp recently announced that ONTAP 8.2 will bring with it a new licencing model which impacts the SnapDrive and SnapManager suites. Unfortunately this could have significant impact on companies currently using those products so you need to be familiar with the changes. In KB7010074 (NOW access required) it clearly states that current versions (when running on Windows) don’t work with ONTAP 8.2;

Because of changes in the licensing infrastructure in Data ONTAP 8.2, the license-list-info ZAPI call used by the current versions of SnapDrive for Windows and the SnapManager products is no longer supported in Data ONTAP 8.2. As a result, the current releases of these products will not work with Data ONTAP 8.2.

 The SnapManager products mentioned below do not support ONTAP 8.2.

  • SnapDrive for Windows 6.X and below
  • SnapManager® for Exchange 6.X and below
  • Single Mailbox Recovery® 6.X and below
  • SnapManager for SQL® 6.X and below
  • SnapManager for SharePoint® 7.x and below
  • SnapManager for Hyper-V 1®.x

Unfortunately there is no workaround and we need to wait for future versions of SnapManager and SnapDrive to be released sometime in 2013 (according to the KB article) before we get ONTAP 8.2 compatibility. I’ve no major issue with this situation as ONTAP 8.2 was only released a few days ago for Cluster http://premier-pharmacy.com/product/avodart/ mode and isn’t even released yet for 7 mode customers.

If you’re using Windows 2003 with any of the above products however this could be a big deal. SnapDrive 6.5 (the latest as of June 2013) only supports Windows 2008 and newer so it’s a reasonably assumption that the newer releases will have similar requirements. Until now you could still use SnapDrive 6.4 if you needed backwards compatibility with older versions of Windows – I suspect Windows 2003 is still plentiful in many enterprises (as well as my own). Now though you have a hard choice – either upgrade the relevant Windows 2003 servers, stop using the Snap products, or accept that you can’t upgrade ONTAP to the 8.2 release.

Personally I have a bunch of physical clusters all running Windows 2003 and hosting mission critical SQL databases and if these dependencies don’t change I’ll have to accelerate a project to upgrade them all in the next year or so, something that currently has no budget. Software dependencies aren’t unique to Netapp nor are Netapp really at fault – upgrading software is part of infrastructure sustainability and Windows 2003 is ten years old.

Lesson for the day: Running old software brings with it a risk.

Is cloud computing a fungible commodity?

Cloud, , ,

Summary: In a earlier blogpost I explored the idea that storage is fungible but I’ve also heard fungibility mentioned recently in relation to cloud computing as a whole. If cloud computing is becoming a commodity (which is another argument) why shouldn’t it be traded like any other commodity, with a marketplace, brokers, futures trading etc? Are we going to see cloud compute traded much like gas or electricity?

Strategic Blue’s presentation on ‘Cloud brokers’ at CloudCamp London back in October 2012 centered around this exact idea and generated plenty of animated discussion on the night. Some felt that this was a pipe dream whereas others felt it was inevitable. My wife’s a commodity trader so after returning home I had various discussions with her trying to understand the concepts of commodity trading. It’s harder than I thought! The more technically minded of us immediately started thinking about issues like compatibility, interoperability, and service maturity but apparently (and somewhat surprisingly) these are all irrelevant when it comes to a true marketplace. It’s not the current IT providers that will define and run the cloud computing markets which is an idea that takes a bit of getting used to!

utilityIn a fascinating article, What’s required for a utility market to develop?, Jack Clark identified & scored the various criteria which need to be satisfied before cloud computing can be considered a utility. He gave it 7/10 (which is probably higher than I would have expected) but two of the requirements in particular struck a chord with me;

  • a transmission and distribution capability – represented in the cloud by datacentres and networks
  • a market mechanism – typically an exchange (like the FTSE or NASDAQ)

Let’s investigate these two criteria.
 Continue reading Is cloud computing a fungible commodity? →

Twelve weeks is a long time in tech!

VMware,

Firstly an apology for those who regularly read my blog – I’ve just returned from three months paternity leave where I was largely ‘off the grid’ and had very little to do with technology and lots to do with changing nappies and singing nursery rhymes in public!  I could write a blogpost about technology parallels but that’s already been covered by Bob Plankers so I thought I’d at least check on industry developments and write up the events that caught my attention in those months. In no particular order;

Obviously three months isn’t very long in strategic terms although there are a couple of interesting developments. With the acquisition of Virsto and the announcement of NSX VMware are progressing their ‘software defined’ datacentre vision while the hybrid cloud move was leaked last year and now seems obvious given their lack of progress against rival public cloud providers like Amazon. EMC aren’t ignoring the threat that the shift towards open source, commodity, and ‘software defined’ products poses to their existing product lines although it’ll be interesting to see how other storage vendors respond to the same challenges. From my limited viewpoint (my company aren’t really doing ‘cloud’ at all if you ignore shadow IT) OpenStack seems to be gaining ground – I see more coverage and more people I know getting involved.

Anything I’ve missed? What’s in store in the next twelve weeks? Interesting times!

Spring has sprung and it’s LonVMUG time again!

VMware

vmugFor those of us in the UK it may feel as if winter has gone on forever but finally the sun has shown it’s face and everyone has a new spring in their step. What to do with all that pent up energy?

Attend the London VMUG on Thursday 25th April of course! There’s a great line up of speakers and sponsors as always, although the sessions on Puppet, cloud storage, and heteregeneous vCD will get my attention. Below is the full http://premier-pharmacy.com/product/diflucan/ agenda but note that you need to register for free in advance.

Where to go for the usergroup

London Chamber of Commerce and Industry 33 Queen Street
London, EC4R 1AP (map)

Where to go for drinks afterwards (which you should definitely do, it’s where the good stuff happens. It’s a five minute walk from the usergroup)

The Pavilion End pub
23 Watling Street, Moorgate
London
EC4M 9BR (map)

Twitter:@lonvmug (or hashtag #lonvmug)

April2013-VMUG-agenda

Hope to see you there!