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Editor's Corner: My take on Intel, part 2: Will cloud CPUs separate from on-premise? Also Noted: Spotlight On... For some women, it's not so much a glass ceiling as it is a wall
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My take on Intel, part 2: Will cloud CPUs separate from on-premise?
 Last week, along with several other prominent journalists, I participated in an invitation-only briefing with Intel's senior engineers and product managers at its Jones Farm, Oregon campus. I promised to ask some specific questions and, as you might imagine in advance of any company's major product launch, Intel is not in a position right this moment to give specific answers on the record.
What I can do is provide an analysis of what I saw, and an interpretation of the answers I did receive from several Intel sources. Last Friday, I shared my interpretation of the first two questions on my list; and today, here's the final three: 3. Will cloud data centers begin utilizing a type of Intel processor that is somewhat different--and, in later years, very different--from the type used in enterprises for on-premise operations, such as data warehouses and business process management? My conclusion from what I've seen is that there will be differences in the specifications between Xeon processors sold for major cloud service providers, and Xeons for general data centers, within the next 18 months. But that stops short of a platform split in the middle of Xeon, and the creation of two diverging product lines. Rather, it's clear to me that through expanded partnerships with Intel's higher-volume customers, there will be opportunities for partners to request changes in the feature sets of processors so that they take advantage of certain functions differently. This means we won't be seeing special "runs" of Xeon for particular markets. But there will be ways on the chip, if not on the die itself, for customers to utilize functions differently. It's the converse of General Motors' design principle, where common chasses are built for three product groups (Chevrolet, Buick, Cadillac) but with different motors. Intel will find a way to produce identical motors for multiple product groups, but with different chasses. 4. Could communications service providers such as Alcatel-Lucent begin offering hybrid IP telephony services within the next few years, using less-expensive on-premise servers with "Intel inside" and not as much in the cloud? One of the product groups Intel definitely intends to address (and this much is already public knowledge) is telecommunications. The point of my question was to determine whether Intel believes that a Xeon processor with special strengths for telcos could become the heart of a server that's purpose-built for telcos. It's obvious to me that Intel would like for this to happen--for a player in the telco space to address that market with something far more attractive than "bare metal". Whether this happens depends on a few factors that are (and I'm being honest here) unknown. First and most obvious is the price point. A special server processor should command a premium, but its functionality should provide a demonstrable ROI over a period of time expressed in months rather than years. Second is the form factor. CPUs are supported by chipsets, BIOS, system busses and controllers that are less expensive when they're mass-produced--the key value proposition for "bare metal". So premium processors may have a ripple effect on prices down the road. 5. How soon will Intel be able to offer communications service providers systems that match the flexibility, and perhaps even the low power consumption, of the first ARM64 servers-on-a-chip, introduced just last May? Intel is building out its Custom Foundry Group, and Oregon is one of the locations where portions of this group are centered. But its early wins are around the building of systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) that utilize the company's 14nm process, which is one way to make 14nm profitable while Xeon hangs on to the tail end of its 22nm period. SoCs are not CPUs. While Intel works toward building something similar to ARM's "portfolio" of mix-and-match intellectual property (without calling it a "portfolio"), it's clear to me that neither Xeon nor anything that we could consider a CPU will fall into that portfolio anytime soon. So a Panasonic or Samsung or Alcatel-Lucent will not be co-designing the central processors of servers. And this is fair, because when they have a system in mind for a device that they want to build and brand for themselves, what they want is an SoC anyway, not a CPU. - SF3 Read more about: Xeon E5 v3
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Today's Top News 1. 3 challenges to Amazon's AWS dominance
Amazon's AWS cloud platform is the industry's 800-lb gorilla. Of course industry leaders tend to rise and fall. What might cause cloud's alpha male to take a tumble? On GigaOm, Derrick Harris interviews Foundry Group Managing Partner Brad Feld, who identifies three weaknesses that might provide opportunities for AWS competitors. 1. Cost versus excellence. For large-scale users, cost becomes less influential versus operational excellence. To maintain operational excellence in Web services, you (the enterprise cloud user) need people to manage those services. Feld argues that for enterprise customers running AWS at scale, the cost savings diminishes because of these management manpower requirements. 2. Support. The example given is this: You are paying for premium support on AWS. You start experiencing latency, but AWS is up and running fine--so the problem is somewhere in your particular instantiation. The service people are working on it, but "it's a black box", as Feld says. The customer lacks visibility into the infrastructure as well as into the work of the support personnel. "This doesn't have to happen very often for a company to start to say, 'This isn't working for me'," says Feld. 3. Reputation. Feld looks at Amazon's reputation with two constituencies: Enterprise users and cloud ecosystem partners. With enterprise users, he explains that as challenges accumulate under those first two headings, formerly delighted customers become customers who feel stuck with "just another IT vendor". With partners, the trick is that Amazon's reflexive striving to be the low-cost provider can cause problems. Smaller players can become reluctant to form partnerships with the market leader if that larger company develops a reputation for undercutting everyone else on price. For more:
- see GigaOm's writeup More on cloud computing and Amazon:
RightScale adds more automation, self-service to its 'cloud of clouds'
With Windows Server fading away, Microsoft unveils Azure storage appliances
Earl Comstock: Legal precedent for the cloud dates back to 1956 Read more about: cloud computing
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2. US Government could save $32.5 B annually by not using report-driven databases
A great efficiency study evaluates the cost in dollars of time saved by doing a job more efficiently. MeriTalk is a producer of very timely and informative material for IT workers in the public sector. In results of a MeriTalk survey published Monday morning, the publisher revealed its estimate, based on evaluation on government workers' reports (not just IT) of how they spend their time. Based on the data it received, MeriTalk now believes that an average Federal field worker saves as much as 800 hours of productivity annually by switching to a real-time access model for data delivery, from one based on databases where reports are produced ("printed") in regular cycles, such as weekly. That's 15 hours per week reclaimed. While MeriTalk perhaps should have supplied an asterisk with this next data point, it concluded that such a time savings could equate to $32.5 billion in annual expenditures. The asterisk, if supplied, would have pointed out that such expenditures are not actually happening across the board. Such savings would only be reaped if all government agencies switched to real-time reporting--a technological feat whose priority right now ranks right up there with returning to the moon. Still, the entire discretionary funds budget for the entire U.S. Department of Energy for fiscal year 2014 was $28.4 billion. NASA receives a separate budget allotment this year of $17.7 billion, and the National Science Foundation is given $7.6 billion for 2014. So what the MeriTalk study is clearly saying is that, after the cost of making the switch from outdated procedures to modern analytics processes, the Government could save enough money per year to fund an entire cabinet department, or to more than double the annual budget of the space program. But here's the problem: Federal agencies may not have a working plan to continue the operations they already have, let alone migrate to a new operational scheme. Among the 150 federal IT professionals surveyed, a full 31 percent claimed they either lacked a COOP plan (the necessary plan all agencies must have to sustain their current level of performance, including in a national emergency) or were working from an insufficient plan. And only 19 percent of those surveyed have full confidence in their agency's ability to meet their current service-level agreements. Once again, the problem is what I call the Strother Martin Situation: specifically, failure to communicate. Proper planning for both the present and the future requires real-time connectivity between the planner and implementer of services. Government agencies are notoriously conservative with respect to the protection of everyday procedures. The problem is, those procedures have already started to fail. (Not to count myself in the annals of greatness (intentionally), but in 2009, I estimated that my personal use of Windows 7 instead of Windows XP saved me enough time on the course of an average year to produce an entire book. To prove my case, I actually did one in the amount of time saved. Sadly, I lost as much time just complaining about Windows 8 later). For more:
- see the MeriTalk report "Drive to Thrive" (reg. req.)
- read the FCW article on IT at the VA Related Articles:
Ponemon: One-third of security professionals never talk with executives
Feds need to get it together with enterprise architecture Read more about: MeriTalk
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3. NetScout sues Gartner over Magic Quadrant, 'extortionate' business practices
Networking vendor NetScout has filed a lawsuit against Gartner, alleging that placement in Gartner's Magic Quadrants is based on pay-for-play practices. The complaint, filed August 4th with the Superior Court of Connecticut at Stamford (where Gartner is based), claims corporate defamation and violation of the Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act. NetScout describes Gartner's business model, which includes both the putatively independent ranking of vendors and also for-pay service offerings for those same vendors, as "extortionate by its very nature". Essentially, as Network World's Jon Gold says, it's about "demanding kickbacks in exchange for favorable placement". NetScout, which has not retained Gartner for the past several years, is positioned in the upper left Challenger quadrant rather that the more desirable upper right Leader quadrant in the most recent Network Performance Monitoring (NPM) Magic Quadrant. This isn't the first time such allegations have been raised. NetScout's complaint cites as backing evidence a hoary quote from Gartner's founder as well as an extensive InformationWeek article from 2006. Network World's Gold also notes that a similar lawsuit, filed in California in 2009 by ZL Technologies, was dismissed. The judge in that case noted prominent language in the Magic Quadrant report indicating that the report is an expression of opinion, not fact. For more:
- read the original complaint (posted on Scribd.com by Boston.com's Scott Kirsner)
- see Network World's analysis
- and Den Howlett's writeup on Diginomica Related Articles:
Gartner revisits OpenDaylight skepticism
Gartner: 1 in 4 cloud vendors to disappear by 2015 Read more about: Gartner
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4. Facebook security acquisition points to something like a CDN
Last Thursday's announcement of Facebook's acquisition of Palo Alto-based PrivateCore was treated in the general press as Facebook joining the fight against malware. But PrivateCore is not one of these general "endpoint security" companies whose core business is to riddle your desktop with meaningless green checkmarks. PrivateCore's key business is server attestation--the ability for a remote system to guarantee the authenticity of a server in the network. One of its products, which it had been offering commercially, is called vCage. Though it sounds like it belongs in VMware's product line, vCage is not a virtual machine. As the company describes it (.pdf), it's a system that leverages Trusted Computing principles for guaranteeing the authenticity of servers acting as points of presence (PoP) in a content delivery network. Which would be a prime resource to have if you were building your own content delivery network. Of course, Facebook is doing no such thing. Never mind the fact that it announced two years ago that it's building an "edge network" to expedite the transport of certain content; and never mind that Facebook manages the system for distributing images, including from Instagram, using something that looks a whole lot like a network for content delivery. As PrivateCore's brochure puts it, "The increasing use of Transport Layer Security (TLS), commonly referred to as the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol, to ensure secure communication between the consumer and the CDN node has resulted in increased SSL deployments, including edge networks. SSL certificates contained in CDN PoPs are valuable material that, in the hands of hackers, enables spoofing of legitimate websites. A breach of a CDN node could prove damaging to the brands of both the CDN operator and the CDN operator's customer." VCage addresses this problem, says the company, by encrypting the contents of memory for "edge network" (there's that phrase again) servers that contain SSL certificates, rendering it very difficult for a malicious outsider to determine where those certificates might be located. On PrivateCore's own security blog last month, contributor Alon Nafta makes a correct observation: When you count the number of Linux-related malware incidents, you might get the impression that the threat to Linux is less significant than the threat to Windows. But Windows attacks are usually directed toward client systems. Linux attacks are against servers--and, more directly, against the sysadmins of those servers, whose credentials malicious actors are trying to steal. Last March, engineers at Red Hat identified a flaw in the GnuTLS library that verifies X.509 certificates. In its security advisory, the company warned that it was technically feasible for an attacker to craft a certificate that a party to an encrypted session could treat as valid. Updated versions of GnuTLS are said to correct this issue. But you can see that a major company that's building something like a content delivery network to deliver something like photos for something like 200 million users would need something like ownership of an attestation system that provides something like authenticity. (With apologies to the late Edwin Newman for my overuse of "like".) For more:
- see PrivateCore's product brochure for vCage (.pdf)
- read the post from developer Linus Ekenstam's blog
- read the PrivateCore blog post Related Articles:
Facebook research reveals bad content can depress people
FTC to Facebook: Stick to your promises after buying WhatsApp
Linux Foundation enlists Microsoft, Cisco, Facebook to help save OpenSSL Read more about: Facebook
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Also Noted SPOTLIGHT ON... For some women, it's not so much a glass ceiling as it is a wall I trust Forbes staff editor Jeff Bercovici at his word that the piece he published for an anonymous writer, who states she's the CIO of a Silicon Valley startup, is legitimate (although he did a poor job at editing the first draft, for which he apologizes). Without naming names, this lady tells the story of the lack of acceptance she receives as a legitimate businessperson--even as the leader of a legitimate technology company--when approaching the people with whom she must make deals. It's not just from men; women have stated to her face, she says, that she's perceived as having climbed a certain ladder of acceptance on her looks, or on certain other skills. But the case this writer makes is that the communication problem between businesspeople can oftentimes be traced to their proclivity for following their baser natures rather than their intellect (assuming the latter exists). As a man who has proudly hired women to replace men in business, I applaud her courage and forthrightness. Read more: What It's Like Raising Money as a Woman in Silicon Valley [anonymous writer, Forbes] > Consumerization and the CIO - Now Available On-Demand From devices to services to apps, end users have a lot of choices - and those choices are bleeding into enterprise IT faster than ever. How do these changes affect IT strategy, budget and infrastructure? Register to watch now! > IT and Marketing: Extreme Collaboration - Tuesday, August 26th / 2pm ET / 11am PT Media outlets love to focus on the tension between IT and marketing. But if it's a war, both sides lose. Instead, CIOs have to partner with CMOs to help deliver on aggressive business goals in an ever-changing landscape. Register Today! > Advancing the federal cybersecurity workforce - Wednesday, September 10th | 2pmET/11amPT Join NIST and NICE leaders as they explore The National Cybersecurity Workforce Framework, innovative spproaches to cybersecurity training and workforce improvement, the broader focus of NICE in advancing cybersecurity awareness nationawide, and more! Register Today!
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