You named your products "Good, Better and Best?" What were you thinking?
“That’s not going to fly with Enterprise customers.” “Are you really serious?” “Funny … but really, what are the names you’re going to market with?” “I’m not presenting these to my customer. They’re too simple.” And that’s when I knew we’d gotten it right. After all, the objective for licensing is to make it simple. Why make it simple? Product licensing is one of those things no one likes or really understands. IDC Research Survey Report (sponsored by Flexera Software) on Software Licensing showed that 85% of organizations were found to be out of compliance with their software license agreements, worse 37% were audited by their software vendors in the last 18-24 months, and 56% were handed true-up bills (21% for a million dollars or more…yuck!). The goals of a license should be to make it easy for customers to know what they’ve got. Make sure they can leverage it to get real business value from their investment. I’ve never met a customer that really wanted to be out of compliance or a sales rep that wanted to hand a true-up bill to their customer. I’ve been part of this conversation in the past and I’m not looking forward to it happening again. Complex licensing requirements make it hard to build a trustworthy relationship and they often slow down decision making. Most of the time no one really understood the pages and pages of fine print. It’s not simple and it’s not good business. How do you come up with a licensing model that’s easy for everyone to understand? Make them simple! And what better way to show simple? Give them the simplest names you can think of …. Good Better and Best or GBB. You don’t need to know the product to know that Better is better than Good and Best is, well the best. But simple naming isn’t enough. The licensing model itself really needs to be simple. F5, with its many different hardware platforms, software modules and various virtual edition options meant a dizzying combination of licensing options (over 1100 SKUs) that required customers to not only know exactly what they needed right now but to anticipate the need for services like web app security or identity and access management for a new app that hadn’t even been developed yet. Today, even though there are even more modules and hardware platforms available, there are a smaller number of licensing options (fewer than 100 SKUs) and customers receive the luxury of being able to take advantage of services they need today to keep their applications fast, secure and available as well as those they might need tomorrow or next month. Licensing for them has become as simple as Good, Better and Best. This is what GBB looks like: What I like about simple is it gives customer confidence. Confidence to use your products broadly. Confidence to simplify their IT environments. Confidence to right size their investments. After a year of selling with GBB, Customer have spoken. We’re seeing broad adoption of F5’s complete suite of capabilities. Customer are future proofing and adding Security Services to their applications. Customers are saving money. Would we name the products Good, Better and Best again? Yes, but now we’ve got a new problem. How do you make Best even better … Bester? In my next Blog I’ll talk about the latest steps we’re taking to ensure we keep it simple as customers move their applications to the cloud.So you're going to the Cloud? Make sure you're using the 5 Minute Cloud Licensing Challenge
Moving to the Cloud sounds simple enough, but as you start it becomes clear that this is a major change. There are many questions that must be answered. How will I move and orchestrate hundreds of applications? Which applications should go first? Which Cloud has the best performance and monitoring capabilities? Can I manage the Security and Networking needs of my applications when there is no longer a data-center perimeter? These are all hard questions that need well thought-out answers. Licensing management should not add to this burden. Before we start on licensing, I’d like to share F5’s perspective on Micro-segmentation. As you move applications to the cloud your security and networking perimeter moves from the datacenter to the application itself. No matter if you’re thinking about containers like Docker or more traditional Virtual Machines, your licensing model should not change. Every Application deserves to be Fast, Available and Secure and having an ADC for every applications is a logical step as you move to the Cloud. Ensuring every application has a complete set of ADC services is easy when you leverage “Good-Better-Best” licensing. According to Information Week moving to the Cloud can add more complexity to an already complex licensing environment. This issue can be so complex 37% of companies responding have a person that spends 50% or more of their time just managing licensing. This is not cost effective. It’s every vendor’s job to bring simplicity to their licensing models. If you can’t understand it in a 5 minute conversation you’ve failed. The 5 Minute Cloud Licensing Challenge So here’s a challenge that you should put every vendor through. Explain your licensing model for the cloud in 5 minutes or less. If you can understand it, chances are you’ll avoid potential compliance pitfalls and the need to dedicate resources to manage your licensing portfolio. The key elements of a simple licensing model are ensuring that you’re meeting your customers where they’re going -- no matter what stage of development an application is at: from experimentation and testing to limited production to full scale deployment, the solutions need to be cost effective. Let’s look at these three scenarios and I’ll show you how F5 is focusing on cost effective solutions that meet customer’s needs. Experimentation & Testing in the Cloud: Cloud Licensing Program Anytime you start testing in a Public Cloud, you want to make sure you’re being cost effective. To make this work we’ve develop a Licensing program called Cloud Licensing Program or CLP. CLP is an easy way to get started because it’s a utility model, you only pay for what you use. The CLP program is available from a variety of different Cloud providers but the most obvious one is via the marketplace at Amazon Web Services. This is a great way to get started because there is no capital investment, you get the flexibility to deploy GBB VE images at a variety of throughput performance levels and there is no need for license management. You simply pay for what you use. Limited Production in the Cloud – Virtual Edition BYOL Once you’ve tested your application in the Cloud, you are ready to go into production. If you’ve used the Cloud Licensing Program and you do the math you’ll find paying for software by the hour when you’re using it 24 hours a day 7 days a week can be very expensive. Like renting a car by the hour and driving it all day every day, it will be the most expensive car you’re ever had. That’s why F5 has a Bring Your Own License (BYOL) program to meet these needs. F5 makes it easy to buy Virtual Editions of BIG-IP and take them to any Cloud based on the same packaging of capabilities you have with Good-Better-Best. With BYOL you can buy these licenses and take them to any Cloud, or move them to other Clouds with a cost model that provides affordability for limited productions. Scale Production in the Cloud – Volume Licensing Subscription So now you’re ready to take 100 or 200 or more of your applications to the Cloud. And just like with CLP, if you buy 100s of VE BIG-IP, the cost of buying them one at a time can become very expensive. To solve this issue we’ve developed a new licensing model we call Volume Licensing Subscription or VLS. VLS is a new licensing option that rounds out our Cloud offerings so that it’s easier than ever to move to the cloud. Look for our announcement on 3/19. VLS give customers the ability to adopt all the advanced capabilities you get with “Good-Better-Best,” provides flexibility to move VE instances to different clouds (both Public and Private), and (because it’s a subscription) the costs are significantly lower than they would be if you purchased the licenses individually. In some cases that savings can be as high at 67% on BIG-IP and 78% for LineRate Point. And because we know moving this many applications will not happen overnight and the number of applications you have in the cloud may scale up and down over time, you can scale the number of VLS instances up and down over time to ensure you’re not overspending on licensing. So that’s about 5 minutes. I hope the different licensing options available to you are clear and you have a better understanding of how to pick the right tool for the right job. F5 is committed to helping customers move to the Cloud. Meeting them with both great technical solutions as well as easy to understand cost effective licensing solutions is a top priority.
Get out your dice! It’s time for a game of Datacenters & Dragons
It’s the all new revised fifth edition of the popular real-life fantasy game we call Datacenters and Dragons DM (Datacenter Manager): “Through the increasingly cloudy windows of the datacenter you see empty racks and abandoned servers where once there were rumored to be blinking lights and application consoles. Only a few brave and stalwart applications remain, somehow immune to the siren-like call of the Cloud Empire through the ancient and long forgotten secret rituals found only in the now-lost COBOL copybook. As you stand, awestruck at the destructive power of the Empire, a shadow falls across the remaining rack, dimming the few remaining fluorescent lights. It is…a cloud dragon. As you stand, powerless to move in your abject terror, the cloud dragon breathes on another rack and its case dissolves. A huge claw lifts the application server and clutches it to its breast, another treasure to add to its growing hoard. And then, just as you are finally able to move, it reaches out with the other claw and bats aside the operators with a powerful blow, scattering them beyond the now ethereal walls of the datacenter. Then it turns its cloudy eye on you and rears back, drawing in its breath as it prepares to breathe on you. Roll initiative.” The cries of “Change or die” and “IT is dead” and “cloud is a threat to IT” are becoming more and more common across the greater kingdoms of IT, pitting cloud as the evil dragon that you will either agree to serve as part of a much larger, nebulous empire known as ‘the cloud’ or you’ll find yourself asking “would you like fries with that?” According to some industry pundits, cloud computing has already passed from the realm of hype into a technology that is seriously impacting the business of IT. The basis for such claims point to small organizations for whom cloud computing makes the most sense (at least early on) and at large organizations like HP who are reducing the size of their IT staff based on their cloud computing efforts. IT as we know it, some say, is doomed*. Yet surveys and research conducted in the past year show a very different story – cloud computing is an intriguing option that is more interesting as a way to transform IT into a more efficient business resource than it is as an off-premise, wash-your-hands of the problem outsourcing option. In fact, a Vanson Bourne survey conducted on behalf of cloud provider RackSpace shows a very different story; at the beginning of 2009 less than 1/3 of small businesses were even considering cloud computing and only 11 percent of UK mid-sized businesses were using cloud as part of their strategy, though more than half indicated cloud would be incorporated in the future.How do you get the benefits of shared resources in a private cloud?
I was recording a podcast last week on the subject of cloud with an emphasis on security and of course we talked in general about cloud and definitions. During the discussion the subject of “private cloud” computing was raised and one of the participants asked a very good question: Some of the core benefits of cloud computing come from shared resources. In a private cloud, where does the sharing of resources come from? I had to stop and think about that one for a second, because it’s not something I’ve really thought about before. But it was a valid point; without sharing of resources the reduction in operating costs is not as easily realized. But even in an enterprise data center there is a lot more sharing that could be going on than perhaps people realize. SHARING in the ENTERPRISE There are plethora of ways in which sharing of resources can be accomplished in the enterprise. That’s because there are just as many divisions within an organization for which resources are often dedicated as there are outside the organization. Sometimes the separation is just maintained in the financial ledger, but just as frequently the separation manifests itself physically in the datacenter with dedicated resources. Individual initiatives. Departmental level applications. Lines of business. Subsidiaries. Organizations absorbed – mostly - via mergers and acquisitions. Each of these “entities” can – and often does – have its own budgets and thus dedicated resources. Some physical resources in the data center are dedicated to specific projects, or departments, or lines of business and it is often the case that the stakeholders of applications deployed on those resources “do not play well with others” in that they aren’t about to compromise the integrity and performance of that application by sharing what might be perfectly good compute resources with other folks across the organization. Thus is it perfectly reasonable to believe that there are quite a few “dedicated” resources in any large data center which can be shared across the organization. And given chargeback methods and project portfolio management methods, this results in savings in much the same manner as it would were the applications deployed to a public cloud. But there is also a good deal of compute resources that go to waste in the data center due to constraints placed upon hardware utilization by organizational operating policies. Many organizations still limit the total utilization of resources on any given machine (and hardware) to somewhere between 60% and 80%. After that the administrators get nervous and begin thinking about deploying a second machine from which resources can be utilized. This is often out of consideration for performance and a fear of over-provisioning that could result in the dread “d” word: downtime. Cloud computing models, however, are supposed to ensure availability and scalability through on-demand provisioning of resources. Thus if a single instance of an application begins to perform poorly or approaches capacity limits, another instance should be provisioned. The models themselves assume full utilization of all compute resources across available hardware, which means those pesky utilization limits should disappear. Imagine if you had twenty or thirty servers all running at 60% utilization that were suddenly freed to run up to 90% (or higher)? That’s like gaining … 600-900% more resources in the data center or 6-9 additional servers. The increase in utilization offers the ability to share the resources that otherwise sat idle in the data center. INCREASING VM DENSITY If you needed even more resources available to share across the organization, then it’s necessary to increase the density of virtual machines within the data center. Instead of a 5:1 VM –> physical server ratio you might want to try for 7:1 or 8:1. To do that, you’re going to have to tweak out those virtual servers and ensure they are as efficient as possible so you don’t compromise application availability or performance. Sounds harder than it is, trust me. The same technology – unified application delivery - that offloads compute intense operations from physical servers can do the same for virtual machines because what the solutions are really doing in the case of the former is optimizing the application, not the physical server. The offload techniques that provide such huge improvements in the efficiency of servers comes from optimizing applications and the network stack, both of which are not tied to the physical hardware but are peculiar to the operating system and/or application or web server on which an application is deployed. By optimizing the heck out of that, the benefits of offload technologies can be applied to all servers: virtual or physical. That means lower utilization of resources on a per virtual machine basis, which allows an organization to increase the VM density in their data center and frees up resources across physical servers that can be “shared” by the entire organization. CHANGE ATTITUDES AND ARCHITECTURES The hardest thing about sharing resources in a private cloud implementation is going to be changing the attitudes of business stakeholders toward the sharing of resources. IT will have to assure those stakeholders that the sharing of resources will not adversely affect the performance of applications for which those stakeholders are responsible. IT will need to prove to business stakeholders that the resulting architecture may actually lower costs of deploying new applications in the data center because they’ll only be “paying” (at least on paper and in accounting ledgers) for what they actually use rather than what is available. By sharing compute resources across all business entities in the data center, organizations can, in fact, realize the benefits of cloud computing models that comes from sharing of systems. It may take a bit more thought in what solutions are deployed as a foundation for that cloud computing model, but with the right solutions that enable greater efficiencies and higher VM densities the sharing of resources in a private cloud computing implementation can certainly be achieved. What is server offload and why do I need it? 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