Telematique, water and fire.

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

More on Utility Computing Standards

The conversation about which I wrote has been getting appropriate attention and more people with credentials weighing in.

James Urquhart points to utility computing market's need for "a standard for server (VM/framework/application/whatever) portability across disparate utility computing service providers."

To which I say: Amen. He then (correctly, IMHO) questions the ability of the virtual appliance concept by itself to be the answer. I got on a soapbox yesterday regarding a standard representation or description of VM assemblages. Were that available, it would go quite a distance to addressing the problem James points out.

For added goodness, Bert and Simon have commented on the post, summarizing their respective points of view. Simon's comment succinctly sets the context by stating that the creation of a non-proprietary standard and encouraging its adoption through open source availability is "...based upon the assumption that you have an engine with allows for portability between one CSP (common service provider) and another." This is the precondition I wish I'd stated as well as he has.

To return to my point: The engine to which he refers will require an accepted standard of description or, perhaps, of prescription. What's needed is a uniformly understood representation of VM assemblages: the application level components (VMs or physical servers), the network's components and the connections that lash them together as a functioning system. A standard limited only to VM description and representation of individual active units is necessary but not sufficient to meet the goal.

Service Level Automation in the Datacenter: utility computing

Recently, I have been telling anyone who will listen that this nascent utility computing market is still searching for a standard for server (VM/framework/application/whatever) portability across disparate utility computing service providers. I like the concept of a virtual appliance, but we need a (non-proprietary) standard, or we need another portability mechanism besides VMs.

Technorati Tags: utility computing, virtualization, standards

Technorati Tags: Standards, Utility computing, virtualization

Utility Computing, Competition and Standards

In the reading I've been doing recently regarding virtualization and utility computing, I came across Simon Warley's blog. One of his recent posts caught my eye for a number of reasons.

The first is his taxonomy of the utility computing market. Until reading the piece, I had (lazily) characterized the market as comprised of the SaaS and IaaS (infrastructure as a service) sectors. By adding the FaaS (framework as a service), I believe that he's done us all a favor. However, I'm now tempted to get granular on everyone and introduce another segment. (More on that later.)

The second reason for calling attention to the post is his rationale for the use of open source as the operational means of achieving standards. A part of me agrees, and another sends up flares. Perhaps the use of the term "open source" isn't as crisp as I need it to be in this case. I'd like to think this through a bit in order to find the my point of view.

I have to agree wholeheartedly that the objective is the formation of a competitive utility computer market, with competition based on price, quality and capacity.

Bits or pieces?: Competition, not greed, is good.

Utility computing concerns taking the idea of utility energy provision and applying it to the world of IT, so that companies buy computing resources in much the same way that they buy electricity - charged according to metered usage.

This market is growing, and will continue to grow in three distinct areas :-

SaaS (Software as a Service) : where entire applications are provided on a utility basis.

FaaS (Framework as a Service) : where an application development and deployment environment or framework is provided on a utility basis.

HaaS (Hardware as a Service) : where raw virtual machines are provided on a utility basis.
...

Update: This will teach me not to post too quickly, which I did before reading through the very interesting dialogue between Simon and Bert Armijo of 3Tera. Bert's submitted comments to the original post and in his own blog here.

I understand both positions. I have "done time" in the formal standards organizations. (Remember OSI? X.400? X.500?) I've also spent a good portion of the past five years in the thick of open source and standardization with the creation of Univa Corporation, a company dedicated to delivering HPC infrastructure based on commercial distributions of and enhancements to the open source Globus Toolkit.

I believe that the crux of the gentlemen's disagreement shows up in this metaphor from Simon:

Agreed, virtualisation is a technology which can be used but it is not utility computing.

However, what you have created is not just virtualisation but the equivalent of Jar files for infrastructure at the HaaS level.

There's an argument that in delivering the "Jar files for infrastructure", what's now called for is the equivalent of the Jar manifest, a formal, standard description of the contents and possibly the recipe for lashing together the assembly of VMs and their contents. Through description standards adopted by and understood by the utility providers, customers have that freedom to "emigrate" from one to another. But I'm not convinced that the actual implementations of infrastructure ... the virtualized network infrastructure in particular ... needs to be open source software. In this regard, I tend to side with Bert.

Where I depart from Bert's argument is when he characterizes 3Tera's AppLogic as maintaining "... the existing infrastructure model of load balancers, NAS, firewalls etc ... that lets you define infrastructure for your app exactly as you would have built it before..." Exactly? I don't believe that's quite the case. The designer of a newly defined assemblage of servers and its underlying networks (physical and virtual) can begin "fresh" to create an extensive and impressive configuration in an AppLogic-based virtual data center. But, the vocabulary used is that of a specially defined, constrained set of load balancers, NAS, firewalls etc.

I'd claim that the network on which the virtualized servers and appliances at the SaaS and even at the FaaS layers has not been sufficiently virtualized, not exposed as a sufficiently rich abstraction layer nor even described in a standard manner. There does not yet exist the layer of abstraction and vocabulary by which one could, as Bert claims, "... take their existing images and move them to traditional colo. No lock-in." If there were, I'd be able to use those same descriptions of infrastructure to efficiently move a "legacy" configuration from a corporate data center or a traditional colo to an AppLogic-based utility or another utility service's HaaS/FaaS (such as Amazon's AWS).

Technorati Tags: utility computing, SaaS, markets

Technorati Tags: markets, SaaS, Standards, Utility computing, virtualization

An Interview with MySQL's Architect

An interesting interview in ComputerWorld with mySQL's architect.  Good discussion of REST and the use of Amazon's AWS services (EC2, S3, SQS) in conjunction with and as a storage engine for MySQL.

MySQL's architect discusses open source, database in a cloud, other IT issues

When I look at your Web site, I see some pretty unusual storage engines for MySQL. You can use a Web site as back-end storage or even memcached for memory-backed storage. Do those engines have any practical application? Or are they more in the nature of sample code?

Technorati Tags: AWS, MySQL, REST

Why Opensource?

A great post by JP, both for his on-point leveling of the three common answers, and for the notion that Opensource makes our (technological) lives richer and safer.

10 reasons for enterprises to use opensource | confused of calcutta

I don’t really understand why it happens, but for some reason far too many people think opensource is free as in gratis rather than free as in freedom. As a result, when I ask people why they would use opensource, the answers are framed in the context of cost. The three commonest answers I get are:
 (a) cheaper to “buy”
 (b) cheaper to run
 (c) cheaper to fix

This not-so-subtle positioning of opensource as “free” somehow translates to the enterprise equivalent of pinko communist left-handed tree-hugging vegetarian, and that’s all she wrote. End of story. So I thought it was time to provide ten reasons of a different sort….

Technorati Tags: Opensource

Groundwork Open Source

Speaking of open source software that's likely to achieve commercial success, I've always appreciated the thinking and approach taken by Groundwork Open Source. It seems that others (with more money to invest than I have) are also of the same mind. DJ's VentureWire (subscription required) is reporting this morning that Groundwork has closed a new round of $12.5 million in an oversubscribed Series C round of financing, led by new investor Jafco Ventures,

Take a look at Groundwork and then look over Tony Wasserman's nine criteria for OSS success.

Open Source Software and Commercial Readiness

Charles Babcock of InformationWeek has a very good and multi-faceted article on open source software in this week's edition.  I particularly like his choice of projects on which to focus and his understanding of the many forces -- market, internal politics, leadership of the open source effort -- that impact the ultimate success of an OSS project. 

The description of Tony Wasserman's "business-readiness rating service for open source code" reminded me of so many issues faced three years ago when I co-founded Univa Corporation to bring the Globus Toolkit into the commercial realm. While it's definitely a simplified approach, it's valuable as a starting point. I'll look forward to seeing more detailed output from the Business Readiness Rating service.

The article is well worth reading.

How To Tell The Open Source Winners From The Losers 

That's a dilemma for the many companies that are expanding their use of open source. Corporate developers and other IT professionals must get better at divining the winners and ignoring the losers. The wrong picks can lead companies down a rat hole of support problems and obsolete software.

Building bridges between OpenOffice and MS Office

Interesting news reported in InformationWeek today about the Microsoft-OpenOffice translator.  I know that many people have tried and then backed away from OpenOffice because of two simple facts: 
(1) The commercial world still runs on the back of Microsoft Office. 
(2) If, in order to work with Office files in an open source productivity application, one must invoke special incantations to view or edit a MS Word document, very few users will adopt the OSS suite.

The OpenDocument - OpenXML translator will make a big difference, so long as OpenOffice makes it a no-brainer, and incorporates the translator within the package using a preference to automatically convert. Add to that the ability to establish a default format in which all word processing documents are to be saved ... take your pick ... and OpenOffice has a chance.

Of course, the next BIG hurdle will be to effectively provide a translator for spreadsheets. 

Microsoft Word-OpenOffice Translator Hits The Launchpad

...The translator provides interoperability between OpenDocument and OpenXML, the native document formats for OpenOffice and Office 2007, respectively. Microsoft does not ship the translator within Office but says it has been tested on Office 2007, Office 2003, and Office XP. Open source distributor Novell, however, has said it will install the translator in its next version of OpenOffice.

The second phase of the translator project is scheduled to begin this month, when developers tackle similar technology for Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet and PowerPoint presentation programs, and competing applications within OpenOffice. Technology previews are expected to be posted to SourceForge.net in May, with final versions scheduled to ship in November, Microsoft said. ...

Technorati Tags: OpenOffice, MS_Word, XML_translator

Battles in Open Source

BusinessWeek Online has published an article about the divergent forces and efforts within the open source licensing community and the revision of the GPL license.

Open Warfare in Open Source

...

But the impetus to make a profit (and its associated compromises) isn't sitting well with true believers in free software. And the resulting rifts were apparent at last week's LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco. On one side is Richard Stallman and his Free Software Foundation. When Stallman says "free" he doesn't mean price, he means freedom. He believes all software should be freely available to be modified by the public. And for him, this is nothing short of a moral fight.

On the other is Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux. He and others in his open-source camp believe that freely sharing code simply produces the best software, but if other people want to hide their code, that's fine, too. Companies will just vote with their feet.

...

The two biggest sticking points (in the GPL's second draft released in July) are patents and digital rights management. HP's objection is a part of the license that says anything touched by GPL code becomes open source. In other words, if a company bundles its hardware with open-source software and ships it to customers, it surrenders rights to enforce patents. "HP had hopes that the second draft would clarify the patent provision such as to ease concern that mere distribution of a single copy of GPL-licensed software might have some adverse [intellectual property] impact on a company," HP said in a statement. "Unfortunately, the concern lingers in draft 2."

Technorati Tags: Intellectual Property

Novell on the Hunt for Management Tools

Doing a little catch-up reading, I came across an article stating that Ron Hovsepian, new CEO of Novell, sees M&A opportunities in the firms management tools. Given the emphasis on SuSE linux, and the ecosystem surrounding it, the first company that popped into my head is GroundWork, definitely a player in the open source IT operations management software arena. Then there are, of course, a few others that seem logical. Michael Baum's Splunk and Centeris come to mind.

A couple of efforts that seem a bit green, but worth looking over: Javier Soltero's Hyperic, which has just made it's debut, and then there are the member companies of the Open Management Consortium (OMC), which Hyperic recently joined. OMC seem to have, as a group, much of the recipe required. In fact, it may be better thought of as a one-stop shopping location for Novell or others looking to pick up the products or features required for a fully built IT management offering. (For a good overview article, see this one from NetworkWorld in May.)

Technorati Tags: IT Management, Utility computing