More Sunscreen or Send In The Clouds?

"Better to save money under SaaS and worry about security holes and potential outages than to elicit the ire of upper management who without revenue growth can only give out directives further squeezing IT budgets and overall cost efficiencies.  Software as a Service (SaaS) dates to the earliest days of the Internet." Even The Adoption of Innovation Is Different 

SaaS dates way back to TSO on mainframes and now some related Nattering on NTNX Nutanix and The Cloud, as opposed to the Cloud and its "coverage"... 

the long term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience… I will dispense this advice now.

If I didn't know any better, NTNX "hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) appliances and software defined storage" are the same fictional product that the Pied Piper startup created in HBO's Silicon Valley spoof, sans the compression algorithm.  

NTNX were just issued a "patent" based on concepts of ancient IBM mainframe products, excepting that this rack server POS uses IP to handle the I/O. That last "break through" and sentence has me laughing hysterically. A BILLION $ enterprise?

As for the Cloud? There has to be clowns, send in the clowns. We are showing our age. Cloud concepts date way back to MVS/TSO/VM/CICS on mainframes, before the unicorn founders and most current IBM management were staining their swaddling cloths with mustard shit. 

But only those of us long in tooth and experienced enough to remember know this. In the day, I was fortunate enough to have worked with Gene Amdahl and some of the best IBM mainframe people in the business.  

But all that real world experience has been shuffled off to Buffalo, much less Armonk or Boca Raton, where the PC was born at IBM ESD (Entry Systems Division). This is why IBM suffers as many corporations do. Their management have spent the last 25 years concentrating on their short term bonus, while fumbling away the future.

Back to the Cloud, which delivers many old mundane "services" in a less than robust, difficult and expensive to manage distributed infrastructure. Unicorns like NTNX are reinventing the wheel to slap on the latest jalopy being renamed, refurbished, rehyped and resold.  

Long story short, nothing more than a version of a TSO time sharing option on an MVS partition with remote access. Exception being, today's distributed rack server version is much more expensive to maintain, less reliable and far too latent.

Temporal proximity in the cloud, cannot be achieved without physical proximity. viz. without physical co-location of the hardware and network, the clown, er cloud, cannot be used for any application which is mission critical and requires millisecond or less response, viz. think many banking, finance, SCADA and real time apps. 

Be careful whose Cloud you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Much like my advice, the cloud is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth. 

The more things change, the more they stay the same, but the young don't know this because its all "new" to them. They should wear more Sunscreen.



Trust me on the Sunscreen, because even Sondheim wants to send in the clowns.  Get in the car and out.