I was recently invited to one of our service providers ‘evening of topical debate and dinner’ events in London. Curiously the most interesting thing I learnt was that most of our cloud-bed-fellows views the marketplace in much the same way we do, same financial hurdles, same technical problems, and we all appear to be coming to the same conclusions. One of the presenters made a very interesting statement, and one I shared.
You see, many of their clients, just like ours, are considering the Cisco UCS Server platform as part of a consolidation and/or virtualisation project but all too often the decision takes forever and no virtualisation or consolidation project ever takes place. His advice was to just make a bet, any bet, it actually didn’t matter which bet but you were never going to win if you never placed the bet in the first place. No sense in checking the lottery numbers if you’ve no ticket in your hand. If you can’t decide to use Cisco UCS servers then stick with the HP one’s you’ve got.
Last month, (or was it longer than that), I claimed that I would be aiming to work almost entirely online, accessing my content from whatever device takes my fancy on any particular day. A number of readers contributed to the ‘debate’, although I hardly think of it as a debate since I didn’t respond to any of them (sorry about that – more about that later), mostly telling me that online was a far too scary place to be. What with the abundance of eastern-european hackers, incompetent cloud service providers and that generally nasty internet – I was destined to lose all my data in some form or other. Fortunately, one of my VMware chums suggested I have a look at Project Octopus and yes I have, and yes it’s perfect.
Now I can tell you all about VMware’s Project Octopus, which I will, but the most significant point this whole episode highlighted to me was that if I hadn’t made such a statement in the first place then my friend would probably have never told me about it. Funny thing is, I didn’t lose any of my data, nor did any of my contacts get subjected to an onslaught of spam and find out about great job opportunities with the finance clearing department of the Somalian Oil Company. Only the other day, my iPhone has got in on the story and asked if I wanted to sync all my pictures, contacts and calendar entries with iCloud… given everything I’ve already said, I could hardly say no could I?
So for those of you still wondering, VMware have announced the beta testing of an project called ‘Octopus’ which is best described as Dropbox using your own data centre as the storage repository. So who’s responsible for the availability of my data, who’s responsible for its security and its backup – me! And that’s as trustworthy as I can get (for me anyhow). Of course there’s a good argument that I don’t want any of that responsibility, nor do I have the time to do any of it – perhaps I really would prefer this delivered as a service in which case the SLAs are very important and yes I would agree with one of my readers that you’d want to read them thoroughly before saying goodbye to your data.
At which point, I must apologise for not replying to any of these comments, you see I don’t get to post my own blogs and as such I don’t get instant notifications of anyone commenting, hence I don’t get to respond directly – that’s another thing I will have to resolve. Now that I’ve embraced Facebook (I’m typing a blog right now, what did you think I was doing?…), Twitter (Gadaffi’s dead, welcome to the new lawless regime…), I’m going to have to take control of my own blogs. For so long I’ve been told by my esteemed marketing colleagues, that the new world, the social media networking world, is where everything is at, where we need to market our wares (did I mention ONI’s Cloud Storage Service?), where I need to ‘get online’, so I’m doing it. I’ve placed my bets and some of them are already starting to pay off. I can’t ever be sure I would have found out about Project Octopus otherwise.
Now let me ask you a question, have you read the iCloud User Agreement yet? All 78
pages?
By Andrew Lawrence, ONI Data Centre Business Practice Manager
