[Info-vax] IBM nearing deal to acquire Red Hat

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 4/27/2019 9:38 AM, Kerry Main wrote:
>> From: Info-vax <info-vax-bounces at rbnsn.com> On Behalf Of Arne Vajhøj
>> On 11/25/2018 1:52 PM, Dave Froble wrote:
>>> On 11/25/2018 8:28 AM, Kerry Main wrote:
>>>> There are many such gotchas under the covers. Most with experience
>>>> are choosing "private clouds" which is essentially the same as
>>>> internal shared services (one IT group for all company depts) with a
>>>> "provisioning on demand" product added on to their existing VMware
>> farms.
>>>
>>> Uh, please help a dumb old polock here, just a bit.  Isn't this the
>>> way it was, back in the day, the company IT department provided
>>> services and such for the company?
>>>
>>> Tell ya what I think, not that anybody gives a damn, I think nothing
>>> has changed, just a bunch of marketing types constantly coming up with
>>> new names for the same old things, just to get weak minds to spend
>>> some money with them.
>>>
>>> The tech has improved, but, we're still doing the same basic things.
>>
>> [sorry for replying to very old post, but topic is still relevant]
>>
>> I guess it depends on the abstraction level you are looking at.
>>
>> If the abstraction level is very high aka "Providing computing resources for
>> the company" then you are right. Same thing.
>>
>> If you dig deeper into the specifics then it becomes very different.
>>
>> 40 years ago: you contacted the IT department and told them that you
>> needed 2 new VAX'es. They charged you a fortune and it took months to get
>> the systems ordered, delivered and configured. It was a project with
>> participation from both business unit and IT department.
>>
>> Today: you start your browser and go to the self service page, you request
>> 200 VM's and upload standard images. After an hour everything is running.
>> End of day you remove instances as they were only needed for the day. End
>> of month your department get charged for 200 x 7 = 1400 VM hours. No one
>> from the IT department does anything as everything is fully automated.
> 
> While the technology is improving, the concepts of what you are talking about has not changed - its only the improved GUI's and level of automation that has improved.
> 
> What you are talking about is capacity on demand (COD) i.e. pay as required when additional resources are required.
> 
> Outsourcers, vendors and many platforms, including OpenVMS and Alpha's, have had an early version of COD or iCOD (instant capacity on demand) decades ago.
> 
> Reference:
> <https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-c00573913>
> 
> The models referred to above "40 years ago .." are still in place today. These are known as Project based resourcing or shared services.
> 
> With Project based resourcing, each project has to order their own resources which always takes a long time to get up and running. That is still in place today.
> 
> The shared services model (public or private clouds in todays hype) takes a more holistic view and orders resources in advance of the project even starting so resources are available when required. As an example, with a private cloud, the IT Dept maintains lots of additional resources, so VM's can be spun very quickly as required. They will typically use one of the many provisioning products that sit on top of hypervisors like VMware which allows the Dev's to provision custom VM's as required.

Capacity on demand.

Capacity in form of VM's.

Tooling for self service.

Charging as utility.

Able to scale extreme.

The concepts may not be new, but the combination of concepts and
how it works in practice are very different from 40 years ago.

Arne