FOSE 2010 update: An interview with a cloud computing industry leader - CDS, Inc.

 

So if I’m going to effectively do cloud computing, I’m going to need virtualization capability. That is, resources that is there, but not physically there until I actually need them.

 

One analogy is to think of it like a video call on your phone or computer. You are virtually present on a screen, but you can’t physically be touched. Not that you don’t exist, you’re just not physically there. 

 

Now let me introduce someone whose vision of cloud computing utilizing virtualization could create jobs for communities. Mr. Stratton is vice president of Professional Services at Commercial Data Systems, Inc. (CDS), a company that began in 1986 in Honolulu as a developer of UNIX software. The company has since expanded and has offices in Albuquerque, San Diego, San Antonio, Huntsville, and Colorado Springs

 

Question 1: So tell me what you’re doing that’s new and exciting in virtualization?

 

Mr. Stratton: At CDS, we’ve been doing virtualization for quite some time, in different modes. We have quite a few customers in the government, civilian and even commercial space, where we’ve been doing consolidation and virtualization very effectively.

 

Now, what we want to do is to get them up to like a complete virtual service. So what does that mean? That means that we’re virtualizing desktops, operating systems, storage, and even applications. So for example, someone will have a rack of six servers that have no disc drives in them, they would just boot off a network. So we have a number of customers that are focused and doing very well using this model increasing productivity while reducing cost.

 

Question 2: So what are some of the major next steps?

 

Mr. Stratton: One major next step in cloud advancement or evolution is once you’ve got that resource consolidation and savings, is to start employing what we call governed standardization. So I’m going to standardize on operating system (i.e. Microsoft or Linux). I’m going to standardize on using a certain storage vendor. And this is the platform we’re going to build on. It’s ubiquitous enough we can start plugging things into it. Imagine using the standards that will allow someone that needs a certain amount of storage for a desktop for a set period of time, actually being given the exact amount of resources to complete the task on time and within budget. Things like that are possible with CDS next step plans and everybody is beginning to understand the model we’re working in. It’s efficient. We might make an exception, but that’s what it will be.

 

Question 3: Are these standards interoperable?

 

Mr. Stratton: In the government, there’s a lot of talk about enterprise architecture. It’s interesting. If you take a look at enterprise architecture, what you see is this silo - separate set of resources that are not part of an organization's enterprise-wide data administration. The email system is one part, the IP Director is another part. You can have an enterprise architecture where none of the underpinning infrastructure is shared. So we’re getting people to think about sharing the infrastructure. If you build it right, it doesn’t matter if it’s from Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, or HP. Whatever the application you need to run your business, you can have one shared infrastructure. That’s one piece of good business.

 

Standardization says, ‘Here’s how I’m going to on-board those systems, here’s how I’m going to run and manage them.’ We’re trying to get our government customers to start thinking like they are a managed service provider and application service provider. Once you start thinking like you’re running a business, you naturally have to adopt a mindset about how to drive costs down. Standardization is about driving down costs and being interoperable. If you do it right, it’s not limiting in any way in your architecture, your application integration ability, and these kinds of things.

 

Question 4: I would think your virtualization model of standardizing different platforms could very useful in the K-12 education system. Have you done anything in education?

 

Mr. Stratton: Absolutely. We have a virtualization called Virtual Schoolhouse. Virtual Schoolhouse is a combination of thin client, Citrix desktops, and some of our early VMware for when we needed heavy desktops that needed larger scale applications. So we had a nice integrated performance combination.

 

Students could theoretically go to any classroom, log in, and get their courseware. In some classes, student would not only work on local courseware and present it to the instructor, but they would also, as a class, connect to someone like Blackboard. This enabled them to take a class off the Blackboard system on the Internet or inside a military system. So it’s very flexible. You can stream in video and capture what’s going on in the world, securely and with safe content.

 

Question 5: Who is providing that background infrastructure?

 

Mr. Stratton: Unlike some other providers, we are primarily an integrator technology company. So if for example Northern Virginia Community College was a customer, we could run some of that for them, or we could run some of that for them on their site and train them, and let them take it over. We are not in the mode, like some other service providers, of wanting to give you a contract, and say, “Don’t worry, we’ve got it.”

 

Question 6: So it is important to you to build organizational capacity for your clients?

 

Mr. Stratton: Yes. We have done some solutions at our data centers, but we tend to use some of the bigger, well-known ones that have good connectivity and recovery capability. But we want to train people on how to become self sufficient and get the most use out of how to effectively create an educational cloud capability.

 

Question 7: Do you see opportunity in the medical health care industry, too?

 

Mr. Stratton: Yes, very much so. Actually, we’re working with Navy medical on a similar idea. The cloud model would work for United Healthcare and for big medical centers. Because in reality, I fundamentally believe the difference between doing hardware, virtualization, consolidation, thin clients, and clouds is really a mindset. The basic technology still all applies once the mindset shift.

 

If we look at the bottom of the cloud, its infrastructure is a service. Its virtualization, our servers, our storage, our application, is a sort of underpinning. So that’s already there. So what we’re doing at the higher levels of cloud is saying, “We’re going to standardize. We’re going to use a certain type of middleware that allows us to plug in application with less work to do. Well, if I start doing platform as a service, then what I’ve said is I don’t have to do this part anymore, because now I’ve got the platform ready to go. All I have to do is load up my dataset - or bring in an application server to run your application. So every time we move up the chain of more cloud-like capabilities, we reduce the amount of time and cost it takes to integrate a new application or service.

 

Question 8: Do your clients need to be a certain size to make that kind of scalability work?

 

Mr. Stratton: What we can do for District of Columbia school at one cost, is still not cost-effective for a Albuquerque, New Mexico school district. At that level, it may make more sense to move the school environment into a secure data center and create a private cloud. Somebody like CDS could manage it more efficiently because they have more experience at it. So we’re very mindful to consider all factors when determining scalability.

 

I personally like my customers involved. I don’t believe in pure outsourcing. I want my customers to know they’ve got the ability to come in and audit at any time and look at the solution. I think clients should at the very least keep some skeleton staff around who can understand and manage the contract we have, and be a partner about what needs to change in the future.

 

Question 9: Why are you so passionate about the partner model? Have you seen in it work better?

 

Mr. Stratton: Yes, absolutely, for both sides. Every time I’ve had good close communication, I’ve had success in projects. The further we got apart, the further we got apart. But once again, like cloud, it’s a mindset. We want to work together with our customers. We don’t want to take over them, we want to enable them.

 

Question 10: Are some of your clients resistant to being ICT enabled?

 

Mr. Stratton: Certainly. A great example in this town is a lot of the associations and nonprofits. They can’t afford to pay somebody to run an Outlook server. I mean you could be talking about a $100,000 person by the time you pay for a person who also knows storage, security, optimization and integration with the capacity to run maybe 50-60 desktops. So yes, definitely there are good reasons to resist.  

 

In other cases, a limited number of people may be a factor. Most school environments have smart people on staff, they just don’t have enough. So that’s where the relationship model works better.

 

Question 11: You and I have talked a little about broadband, power lines, and white space devices. Do you see those emerging developments changing your cloud computing model?

 

Mr. Stratton: I think at the service delivery edge to the consumer, it makes it more ubiquitous. It makes it much easier. For example in Washington, D.C. you really need, broadband to Tele-work, because the applications are designed to utilize maximum bandwidth. .

 

I think the expansion of broadband means there’s that many more people we can serve up with applications without making changes to their systems. For me, broadband becomes the final mile. It becomes that promise of the Internet. That final mile promise that says children can be on the Internet and learn and do what they need to do and people can communicate, and interact with their local governments much more freely. That’s important. We’re talking about bringing a lot of rural American and other parts of the world into the world community, with that communication.

 

Question 12: But now you’re got higher storage demands along with the need for more bandwidth. Is virtualization the best answer?

 

Mr. Stratton: That’s an interesting question. At a state level, for example, how would you design a system that is going to make all these services available? I have a good friend who just retired from the State of Maryland who, and he was the GIS manager. So he was the one who would allow us to see all different kinds of data available on a map. The real boundaries of a property and things like that.

 

So they had huge amounts of data. The question is, how do you make that available, and how do you do it in such a way that doesn’t bankrupt the state or the city? I think geo-spatial is the way that data seems to be headed, because people can recognize it and comprehend it and ingest it better in a geo-spatial environment. So I think we’re seeing the need for really smart web services to be built.

 

We’re not throwing anything away. The storage systems are getting so cheap now that they’re cheaper than tape. This means that you can keep lots of data online for a long time. That is still in some cases beyond what local governments can do, and I think for example in the state of New Mexico, we’re starting to see some of the state agencies band together and thinking about cloud consolidation of services and capabilities. That means some of those agencies give up on being IT shops, and become data owners instead of IT managers themselves.

 

Question 12: Going back to your organization, do you feel you’ve got a solid foundation that allows you to grow as market trends and demand grows or will you anticipate the need to change?

 

Mr. Stratton: With our virtualization capacity we are built for change. For example,
several Department of Defense (DOD) focus areas we’re involved in actually create a lot of feedback into the commercial market, which is nice for all parties. One of those is high-performance computing. We just created the 10th fastest computer in the world with National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). The computational model of very high-performance simulation computers, is actually a cloud model. It’s a bunch of small component, little servers, virtualized to be able to run different workloads to try out different energy and distribution models and scenarios.

 

As you can tell, our company loves technology. But we have enough experience to understand that we have to back away from the precipice a little bit. Because what we can do at a lab with 3,000 of the world’s smartest scientists is different than what we can do in a K-12 environment with limited resources. So we look for technologies and how can we apply those when they are mature enough. We have eight what we call virtualization integration pods. At the pods, we bring in new applications, and we look at new systems, capabilities, procedures, and processes. So we are always continually researching the market, investigating what’s going on, looking for lower cost cross points.

 

We focus on two things: 1) how do we help reduced the number of things that people have to manage, using for example consolidation, and 2) how do we reduce the kinds of things. We might want to reduce the number of servers, but we also want to reduce the fact that they are managing, for example, six different vendors. So how do we reduce the number of things we manage, and the number of kinds of things we manage? We want to get away from the old ‘best of breed’ mentality where we have 10 different things come together and create a solution. We want fewer things that make it easier to manage, less costly to own, and less warranties to keep up and operate. So that’s big for us.

 

So we are able to stay, because of some of the national-level things we do, out on the edge. But we see how a lot of this edge technology will apply to the civilian, and certainly the state and local marketplace.

 

Question 13: What about cyber security challenges associated with cloud computing? Is cloud computing a safe enough environment, in your opinion?

 

Mr. Stratton: No. But I must say honestly, I come from a DOD security and NSA background, so I know what kind of security can be done. One of the keys that make clouds so powerful is that, now with Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), we can have a private cloud and do things much more securely.  So we can still use SOA to deliver services outside the firewall in a very secure way to our customers. So the combination of cloud technology and SOA come together and create a very strong capability to do things much more securely.

 

Question 14: What advice do you have for people who are not that familiar with virtualization and cloud computing?

 

Mr. Stratton: There are some people who want to jump from virtualization, to be a cloud provider and provide software as a service. They don’t understand the gap and all that is needed to efficiently do that. So I think the key advice is to determine how they are going to grow their leadership and staffing to do secure cloud computing in their internal environment first.

 

Question 15: What about clients who aren’t sure about cloud computing?

 

Mr. Stratton: We have several customers that are interested in saying, “Well, we have a traditional data center and we run stuff for other people, and we want to go to cloud. What does that mean?’ Well, we are proposing to them that they can buy a cloud system from us, we will put together an integrative operating system for them, but we will operate it with an exit strategy whence they have come up to speed.

 

So unlike other commercial entities that want to take it and run it and keep it, we want to make clients capable to run it themselves. We are not in the business of taking jobs away from people. We want to be just like broadband. Rural broadband has the potential to be a job creation entity. I want to create jobs. I want to keep that customer. I want those people who are dedicate and committed running that system, because that just makes my government, my state and local entity that much stronger. If we need to do training for a little longer, that’s ok. But we have an exit strategy because we want to make customers self sufficient, and then we want to help them work on the next problem.

 

Mr. Stratton, thank you for sharing information about your organization and yourself. The information covered in this interview epitomizes what the public has grown to expect from FOSE each year. 

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