Blog Tag

Well, I got tagged (not the graffiti type) by Steve Wilson. Now it’s my turn to reveal 5 things-you-don't-know-about-me, and then tag 5 more unsuspecting-yet-interesting folks… But first, I had to do a bit of the pedigree/ancestry tracing to see where this tagging all began:

Steve first got tagged by Rich Green (a former colleague; and prior to that, a former colleague); Sin-Yaw Wang tagged Rich; Hal Stern tagged Sin-Yaw; Mary Cay Kosten tagged Hal. Then the trail went cold... Mary Cay’s original tag was from behind Sun’s Firewall, so this was a dead-end.

So I took another track from someone else I know: Jonathan Schwartz was tagged by James Governor (of RedMonk, a cool analyst group I’ve worked with in the past); James was tagged by Jeff Pulver. Ahh. Jeff points to the "Root" of Blog Tag pedigree, 3 orders-of-magnitude better/bigger than mine, residing at Solo SEO ... clearly indicating that some folks have way too much time.

Anyway, here goes the whole point of the thing:

1. I once sailed 1,300 miles from Myrtle Beach SC to Tortola, BVI – with no electronics onboard except a UHF radio and a Timex digital watch. There were 3 of us onboard for 10 days (fortunately two of us knew how to use a sextant). It was one of the most memorable times of my life, being at the mercy of the elements, but having ‘science’ in our back pocket. We made landfall within a mile or so of our target… You gotta read the book “Longitude” to appreciate how important this form of navigation was.
2. I was a product of the Reagan defense-spending era – my first job (just out of engineering school) was working for a defense contractor designing and building hardware-based real-time adaptive optics and wavefront correction systems. Next time you hear about DoD blowing planes out of the sky with lasers, think of me. (I think that’s all I’m allowed to say about that)
3. I’d rather be renovating a bathroom, laying tile, or for that matter, building a house. There’s something intensely gratifying about building something permanent/durable.
4. I wrote a program (circa 1979) in Basic on a Commodore PET with 16k of RAM that played Solitaire. Yes, just 16k. When I finished, there wasn’t enough space to actually execute it. This was perhaps my finest (and final) foray into software. Unless you consider writing FORTRAN batch jobs using punch-cards on a Sperry/Univac.
5. I started building a historically-accurate plank-on-frame scale model of Lord Trafalgar’s flagship, HMS Victory, back when I was in high school. I put 18 months into it and got as far as building the hull. Then life intervened. Once the kid(s) are out of school, I burn-out in High Tech, and I get over that “I’ve gotta build a house” thing, the HMS Victory is how I plan to occupy my remaining time in the Rest Home.

And now, the Tag-You're-It list (which isn't so easy when most of your friends don't yet blog): Ashesh Badani, Rich Sands, James Urquhart, David Gee, and Vinay Pai.

Virtual Infrastructure Diversity... and the Need to Manage it.

I can't take credit for the following observations... They were simply handed to me by one of Cassatt's best account executives, who spends endless days speaking with CIOs and operations personnel who manage huge, diverse data centers - and who frequently miss these important facts. He's noted that "Virtualization" is being inaccurately subsumed to mean the software hypervisors purveyed by VMware.

However, the Truth is that virtualization is multi-vendor, multi-technology, and inherently heterogeneous. So: How will these diverse technologies be managed in the future? Here are some observations:

1. People are confusing ‘Virtualization’ with VMware (but remember, there are more types of virtualization than just hypervisors for software!)
2. VMware’s scope is limited to X86 Platforms. Most organizations have more than X86.
3. There are other types of Virtualization within other platforms (Example: Mainframe LPARs, Solaris containers/Zones, HP VPARs).
4. There are even Virtualization alternatives in X86 (XenSource, Xen/RHEL, Xen/SuSE, and SWSoft Virtuozzo and others).
5. There are different types of Virtualization (JVM, VLANs in the network domain, SAN & NAS in the storage domain, not to mention Incipient and 3Par).
6. VMM Virtualization is an OS feature and it’s price will be commoditized to $0 over time. Evidence:
   - Historically LPARs came with MVS
   - Sun does not charge extra for Containers/Zones
   - IBM AIX & HP-UX don’t charge extra either
   - JVM’s are free.
   - VLAN-ing comes built-in into Switch Firmware
   - You can get NAS for free or pay for specially-tuned version in Proprietary Hardware (NetApps)
   - Watch out in the SAN-space but it will be interesting to see where that goes with iSCSI and 10Gig Ethernet etc.
7. A comment on X86 VMM-pricing:
   - Red Hat will deliver Xen for free in RH5
   - SuSE will deliver Xen for free in SuSE 10.x
   - Intel supports it for free in Intel-VT chips
   - AMD supports for free in their Pacifica chips
   - XenSource costs 25% of VMware and will eventually be acquired by somebody who will give it away for free as part of something else
   

Thus we see that there are nearly dozens of types of "virtualization" that need to be managed collectively - many of them are already present in data centers, and many will be available for free (or nearly so) in the near future.

This is the next impending management crisis - management, automation, and optimization of virtualized computation, containers, storage, and networking.

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.