Postcards from IDC’s Virtualization Forum 2.0

I just attended the IDC analyst conference yesterday in New York. In some sense, the big news was simply how pervasive virtualization is becoming, and how many different technology sources there are. And most interesting, there was lots of talk about *managing* virtualization, not just using it for consolidation.

John Humphreys (Enterprise Computing) opened with some riveting statistics:

• 62% of VM users are looking for a “unified tool”
• 45% of servers planned for installation next year will be virtualized
• 23% is the average savings being reaped from HW, power and facilities
• 70% of IT costs still reside in operations... not in hardware or software.

In addition, he had the foresight to refer to VMs as “the new atomic unit of management.” Hmmm. Right up Cassatt’s alley.

Finally, under “challenges”, one of the big bullets was “How can you consolidate/manage across the DMZ?”... which I found interesting. True, it’s a growing issue, but frankly, with automated network configuration, Collage already manages virtual (and physical) resources across a number of virtual networks.

We also spoke 1:1 with analysts Matt Eastwood (VP, Enterprise platforms), Michelle Bailey (Datacenter Trends), and Al Gillen (VP, system software). Overall, they confirmed the themes that Virtualization is pervasive, and the challenges were becoming how to manage this new technology. Topics of note:

• Managing across networks (as above)
• Parameterized & “mass-produced” provisioning of VMs
• Managing a virtual enterprise across geographies
• Justifying economics beyond hardware savings

Besides the better-known technologies (i.e. VMware and Xen) there were also some interesting virtualization options:

• Trigence: which has an interesting “encapsulation” technology; they don’t use a hypervisor, per se, but rather encapsulate an application, plus all relevant files/libraries, etc. so it’s completely portable
• SWsoft: which has a unique virtualization approach which, if you only care about one OS, gives you high performance and a huge degree of consolidation
• HP and IBM: both hyping their versions of self-managing blade systems.
• IBM has also announced their Secure Hypervisor (sHype) product, that may be incorporated into 3^rd-party hypervisors.

From a purely selfish perspective, Cassatt is pretty well-positioned to help manage/automate an upcoming need: as the Virtualization market matures, more datacenters will need a vendor-neutral way of managing across virtual and physical domains, pooling resources, and guaranteeing service levels.

Clothes Dryers, Data Centers, and Power Management

Just saw this article on an intelligent appliances communicating with the local power grid. Basically, there's now a clothes dryer that checks-in to see if power is "expensive" (i.e. is it a peak period, or is there a power emergency) and only turns on during off-peak times to save money. Intelligent power consumption is a reality.

This says to me that the concept of intelligently balancing Supply/Demand is ever-more sophisticated - it's not just about one meeting the other: It's about optimizing the economics of the deal.

So What If IT economics had a similar governing economic decision-making process? It can exist today - whereby the how, where and when of compute resources could be governed by a number of variables (i.e. cost of hardware, availability of resources, importance of the SW service) including the cost of the power/cooling/facilities. You might have a "follow-the-moon" system, whereby data centers might have jobs routed to them when they're off-peak, and resources are cheap. Like at 3:00am, when your clothes dryer is running.

Why Don't Servers Self-Consolidate?

With the mad rush to virtualize and consolidate servers, there's quite a market for "Consolidation planning" tools. (i.e. PlateSpin's PowerRecon, Provment's Capacity Planner, and others). But what I don' t get is that, once you've figured out how to optimize your consolidation -- like a "best fit" for puzzle pieces -- things will change. So, a few months down the line, most datacenters have to re-consolidate.

With all of the automation tools becoming available, you'd think that some of them (I have one in mind) ought to be able to continuously monitor the active services, priorities, resource needs and available resources... and then continuously shuffle-around the virtualized applications to ensure "best-fit" consolidation. That way, you never need more than a maximum number of machines for any given service demand level. And, if you're really smart, these automation tools ought to physically power-down the unused servers to save on power & cooling.

The world only needs 5 computers

Back in November 2006, Greg Papadopoulos, Sun's CTO, offered up a Blog positing that the compute world will consolidate down to 5 big compute facilities (i.e. Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay, Salesforce.com). I might humbly also add a carrier like Verizon... Not that anybody won't have laptops, and not that enterprises won't have data centers. It's just that the really large, generalizable, economy-of-scale computing will become outsourced and centralized.

And hey, it's happening already - and any IT professional (and even small business owner?) has to start thinking about it:

• Applications are being delivered as a "service" both on salesforce.com - and on their sister site, AppExchange. In fact, AppExchange is essentially a community where 3rd-parties can contribute compatible applications that salesforce.com then hosts as a service.
  
• Google (and others) are dipping their toe in the water (and more!) by providing applications like calendars, spreadsheets & productivity tools, and others, in a hosted environment - they store all data - and not just documents. i.e. I used their Browser Synch to store all bookmarks, personal preferences, etc. -- so, no matter what computer I sit down at, I have my entire browser preferences available. Doesn't this really begin to blur the line between local computing and what happens in the "cloud"? hey, and maybe stay tuned for the much-rumored "Gdrive"...
  
• Amazon.com - here's the big entrant - offering-up their "Elastic Compute Cloud" (EC2) as well as their "simple storage service" (S3), and even a queueing service. Users can leverage Amazon's huge IT infrastructure by creating virtual machines of any flavor and deploying applications of their choice on them, using the EC2 storage, etc. It's getting to the point where I won't need a backup drive, and IT managers don't need a single in-house server.
  

So, consider this: the picture above confirms that the compute world is moving toward "compute utilities".

How are we going to get there? 2 ways - "Build" and "transition".

• Build - well, that's exactly what the above companies are doing - it requires lots of capital, and a huge user base. And the race is off...
• Transition - by this I mean, decreasing the barriers-to-adoption of using these resources. For example, on the consumer side, look at things like JungleDisk, a new entrant, that makes it simple & accessible for anyone with a PC to use the Amazon S3 - and for only $0.15/month/GB. I might not need a hard drive soon. And for example, on the enterprise side, consider utility automation controllers like Collage, where compute requirements will be assigned to the most economically-advantageous resources -- either in-house, or perhaps, to Amazon's EC2!

I know the electricity analogy is getting old - but it's really happening in computing: we're moving from lots of different home-owned "generators" with their unique 1-off construction - the way it was at the dawn of the industrial revolution (OK, think home Solar power), to one where the vast majority of users pull resource off of a utility, where the generation happens in a place with very high economies-of-scale.

Virtualization is dead: Long-live virtualization!

Although it's a red-hot topic now, I believe virtualization is just a stepping-stone to bigger disruptions and changes in how IT infrastructure is managed. I'm betting virtual machines become a ho-hum topic in a few short years, and disappear into the background as free, generic components.

First-off, most folks are viewing virtualization simply as using a hypervisor to de-couple the OS from the hardware... while allowing multiple OS's to share the same hardware. This begins to reduce the importance of the underlying hardware (making it more of a generic resource) and also allows for a more "fluid" approach to locating software applications. So, at a basic level, people are swarming around virtualization to "consolidate" software, making better overall use of existing hardware.

But, don't forget that networks can be virtualized -- i.e. VLAN switches, Routers and even naming/address spaces can be changed on-the-fly to make better use of resources, and storage can be virtualized too -- i.e. LUNs, file systems, file names etc. can be abstracted away to make better use of resources as well. Check out Xsigo that is virtualizing NICS and the network fabric, or 3Par that's virtualizing storage

Anyhow, pretty soon, virtual machines will probably disappear and become free utilities, part of the OS -- or, more probably, part of applications themselves. (check out the companies like rPath that are creating "software appliances")

Virtualization's _real_ value is as the enabler to allow for automation engines to create and control shared computing, network and storage pools. In effect, virtualization enables the automatic "impedence matching" that IT operations folks have been craving for years. The result? The ability to provide utility-style computing: rules-based optimization and re-allocation of resources in a data center - including usage metering and more.

My prediction? Virtualiztion will be red-hot for another 2 years - and then fade into the background like so many other technologies, to be replaced by all of the white-hot automation products to follow.

An O/S for the data center?

I can’t take credit for this idea – it goes to Rob Gingell, Cassatt’s CTO, previously a VP and Sun Fellow. (Rob's blog)

But think of this: Software operating systems broker resources between applications, manage storage, I/O hardware and drivers, peripherals, etc., and even set priorities between them. They even (especially in Unix) isolate failed applications, if not, on occasion, re-start them. Also, mainly with Unix/Linux, OSs essentially isolate the underlying hardware from the applications – the user may never know (or care) if the platform is x86, RISC, etc.

So why not carry this analogy to the datacenter (where “the network is the computer” anyway)?

The problem set in the data center is similar: Operators spend most of their time balancing application resources between machines and across the network, installing drivers, adding patches and new software, re-starting failed servers, adding storage, doing backups, etc. In fact, in talking to customers, I’ve heard that almost 90% of time is spent “keeping the lights on” rather than doing value-add work. So, then why isn't there a technology that takes these manual tasks and and handles them as-would an O/S?

In full disclosure, this concept is essentially what Cassatt is trying to do: automate day-to-day operations so to have the data center operate as if it had an O/S. In this manner, administrators’ tasks are up-leveled to monitoring/maintaining overall capacity of compute power, memory & storage, deploying (but not managing) applications, and aligning the “O/S” operation with their business policies.

Then, maybe, operators will have more time to do fun stuff.

Introduction to (my version of) The Fountainhead

I've finally initiated a blog-of-my-own... after having thought it ever since I was with Sun Microsystems, where all employees were encouraged to do so (blogs.sun.com). Although Sun is in the midst of some hard times, they clearly are leading the way of "corporate transparency" - lead by Jonathan Schwartz (Wow. A CEO who blogs) - by encouraging employees to share thoughts and opinions. So, after that experience, and having read The Cluetrain Manifesto, I now embrace the importance of sharing ideas...

My theme here will be relatively focused: To highlight my personal perspective on valuable, yet untapped, opportunities in technology (did you catch the reference to Ayn Rand?). I'll also probably comment on where I challenge conventional wisdom, as well as antithetical or counterintuitive approaches, that might in fact be a "new way forward." (In no way am I, or do I plan to, endorse the Administration's current or future policies...). Thanks for reading.