Telematique, water and fire.

Grid Gurus

Rich Wellner, my friend and former colleague at Univa UD, has started editing a blog called Grid Gurus. He's got a very talented group of people contributing, including Ian Foster, Tim Freeman, Sinisa Veseli, and Scot Koranda.  The blog already has a nice collection of themes developing ... and I can't wait for the next 434 parts of "Better Know a VM."

Grid Gurus: Why the grid is still important

Grid computing is celebrating 11 years next month, and is poised to become increasingly mainstream in the coming years. There are a number of reasons that this is true, and most of them are the time tested ideas that have been proving themselves in your research institutions and businesses for years. The grid is about allowing your organization to run more efficiently and more effectively than can be done with more conventional technology solutions. It's about bringing many machines together in coordination around a task. It's about bringing data storage and movement to bear in a coordinated fashion with your application. It's about allowing people from different parts of your organization to work together more easily.

Gartner advises IT execs for 2008

Although it comes as no surprise that Gartner's top 10 for 2008 made sure that virtualization showed up on the roster, David Marshall points out that virtualization was closely related and an enabler for many of the other items that show up on the list.

David Marshall | InfoWorld | Gartner's Top 10 for 2008 - Outlook Virtual and Green

... When talking about Gartners top 10 list, Hillier made an interesting observation when he said that virtualization has become the unwitting enabler for many of the top 10 items listed by Gartner. And he added that many of the top 10 issues didn't even exist when virtualization was first conceived, yet its advantages in efficiency and flexibility make it an obvious choice to deal with many of them.

When asked about virtualization specifically, Hillier noted that "Firstly, virtualizing the 'low hanging fruit' is completely different than tackling the complex mission critical systems that reside deep in the data center. This will cause organizations to place more rigor on the planning and execution of these initiatives, and to integrate this more seamlessly into the long-term management of the environment. In addition, virtualization is only truly transformational if the paradigm is embraced fully, and quick-and-dirty implementations will leave you with a 'virtual physical' environment, that looks and smells like a physical environment but takes up less rack space. This may be expeditious, and indeed is warranted in certain situations, but it completely undersells the potential of the technology." ...

Netsec and Virtsec

Greg Ness of Blue Lane has a great post at AlwaysOn. Somehow, he manages to hit almost all of those strongly held points of view I hold regarding the impact of virtualization on data center networks.  Among the most relevant: 

• Virtualization changes the game for network security.
  
• The mobility of virtual machines on a network revisits a scenario in the data center that was last seen when end users started plugging dumb WiFi access points into corporate LANs.
• Fabrics replace pipes in the corporate network.
• More proof (?) that attending to perimeter security only will come back to bite you.  One has to consider the "threat from inside", and the problem of the "soft middle."

Nice job, Greg.

Netsec and Virtsec: Weird Scenes inside the Gold Mine | AlwaysOn

...
Virtualization will Disrupt Security

The next reason is virtualization. While virtualization has become widely known for energy savings and data center consolidation, its power to increase the flexibility of an IT organization has been undersold. While Wall Street and a handful of companies now get it, I think the network security world is in the process of being shocked into submission. A recent Pacific Crest report predicts the virtsec market will reach $1-$2 billion in the next 3-4 years. Yet the netsec vendors are notably absent with any real products.

Many of the netsec experts are just starting to realize that virtualization is about to turn the hardware game upside down and drive even the most successful appliance vendors to convert their hardware into software appliances. While editors and pundits wax and wane about power and real estate savings and whether virtualization is more or less secure (than physical infrastructures), a much deeper fundamental shift is about to take place and pull the rug out from under the netsec hardware ecosystem.

Servers Going Mobile

By its very nature virtualization decouples hardware from operating system and application. A hypervisor platform is the equivalent of a new and very powerful data center operating system that allows servers to be created, saved, reverted to an earlier version and moved online and offline and across various host servers, all at the click of a mouse. Compare that to the world of racks of custom hardware and approval processes typically required to make moves or changes.

By decoupling software from hardware, virtualization is putting in place the preconditions for a massive shift in the network appliance business, from application delivery to network security. We’re about to see data center [racks of specialized custom chips sitting inside heterogeneous panoplies of tin-wrapped circuit boards and wandering cables] convert into uniform racks of powerful blade servers. The world of servers defined by operating system and applications will become the world of virtual servers (virtual machines or VMs) directed by mouse click across processors, hardware or even an entire data center. ...

Technorati Tags: netsec, virtsec, data center

Citrix - XenSource sets the sales strategy

Opening up markets has been VMware's job and their strength.   Citrix-XenSource will need to be more than a me-too in server and desktop virtualization if it has any chance of coming in as a winner. One of the ways it might differentiate itself is in the focus it puts on the mid-tier enterprise market and on the SMBs.  It makes sense to deliver their product in OEM form and to develop the VAR strategy that targets precisely these sectors.  It's not that they'll be left alone to mine those markets. They'll need to differentiate their offer (as well as support their channels with a LOT of muscle).  The question in my mind is how they'll best deliver that differentiation.  Seems to me that open source technology that  supports XenSource would be among the most fruitful.

Citrix recruits OEMs, VARs to fuel open source virtualization growth

Citrix will release "a couple of announcements hopefully before the end of the year" detailing which major vendors will preinstall Citrix's XenExpress OEM Edition hypervisor on their servers, according to Matt Haynes, Citrix's director of sales strategies, channels and field marketing. "That OEM strategy will be part of our go-to-market strategy," he said.

The alliances may not move XenSource -- an open source virtualization developer Citrix acquired in August -- into parity with VMware Inc.'s market-leading software, but they should narrow the competition, Haynes said.

The agreements will be similar to the one VMware announced at last month's VMworld, under which VMware's ESX Server 3i hypervisor will be integrated with server hardware from Dell Inc., Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM, NEC and others.

...

Citrix is also crafting a channel strategy to complement its technology and OEM push, Haynes said. Its goal over the next 18 months is to add 1,600 channel partners globally to sell the XenSource XenEnterprise version 4 open source virtualization software.

Technorati Tags: Citrix, XenSource

CBR

We're about to see a philosophical battle waged in the trade press and in the third party market for the hearts and minds of CIOs and IT managers.  It's all about the best approach by which to manage a data center impacted by virtualization, particularly server virtualization.  Among the most fundamental issues will be whether today's approaches for managing the purely physical assets are amenable (with minor modification) for use with the virtual -- or whether the problem is so significantly different that the solutions must be rethought and retooled.

How to make virtualization add value - Computer Business Review

... The biggest issue with the current crop of systems management tools is that they all rely upon manual policy setting, which, in the virtual world, becomes even more complex than it currently is. Imagine monitoring hundreds of virtual machines (VMs) and receiving many different alerts, which must have a corresponding policy, or be reverted to an operator for intervention. When, in this scenario, the organization wants to monitor a complete business service executing different applications on a range of physical and virtual environments, this requires many separate point solutions to be configured and integrated.

Systems management tool vendors are only now responding to the rise of virtualization as a technology, which is set to become widely adopted in most data centers in the next two to three years. The problem with this late arrival is that management tools are perceived as playing catch-up with the technology, which is rapidly evolving into many different solution architectures. ...

Technorati Tags: management, VM

Back in harness...

After a week hiking in the mountains of northern Mexico, it's time to get back to work.  But, hopefully the afterglow will live on for a while.  What a great experience, and what a wonderful group of people we've found there.