Data Center Strategies

It's Your Move Dell

By now, most of us have seen the move by HP to acquire EDS for $13.9 Billion. This is good move – albeit risky – by Mark Hurd and HP to compete with IBM at an enterprise level. HP understands that enterprise credibility is built with a comprehensive product and services portfolio that can address large customer’s IT needs. Dell doesn’t get it, but I suspect they got a good education today.

From a services perspective, the move by HP leaves Dell with few options to get into the services race. About the only possible acquisitions left are Unisys (already a Dell services partner), Accenture, Computer Science Corp, and Perot Systems. Accenture is probably the cream of the crop, but their price – thanks to HP’s move – may be more than Dell wants to pay at this point.

And although Dell has quietly parted from the anti-acquisition (aka “the Dell way”) methodology of getting into a market, the problem is, Dell’s mentality is still small time. In case you haven’t noticed – it was easy to miss – Dell managed to pick up a few companies and threatened to climb out of the services cellar. For example Dell acquired Everdream in November 2007, Silverback in July 2007, ASAP in August 2007, and MessageOne in February 2008. All of these moves may have been necessary, but as Simon Cowell might say, these acquisitions are “all a bit forgettable”. In other words, there’s no brand recognition, nothing that customers can hold onto to (or Dell can point to) that shows Dell now has enterprise services credibility.

But IT service isn’t the only place where Dell lacks enterprise credibility. Dell’s product portfolio is lacking the power to reach into some enterprise accounts. This situation reminds me of a meeting at Compaq (circa 1994). The gist from executive management was that Compaq (a $20 Billion dollar company at the time) could not compete in some accounts because it did not have enterprise products necessary to win the account. In other accounts, it could only win a portion of the IT budget (those tied to x86 servers and small business storage). Compaq executives realized – correctly – that the Compaq brand lacked enterprise credibility—they needed to acquire the technology and talent necessary to compete, rather than building it internally over several years. As a result, they acquired Tandem (Non-stop platform) and DEC (enterprise services, storage, workstations, VAX, 64-bit computing, top-notch compiler team…the list is so long), which gave Compaq the goods and brand recognition to compete at an enterprise level.

Dell needs to do the same. They’re basically at the same point Compaq was in 1994. The Dell brand is lacking the enterprise punch to compete. And with more HP “feet on the street” than ever, Dell will increasingly be marginalized -- pushed out of accounts where they don’t have the product portfolio to “own the entire account”. They need to acquire the technology rather than slowly building internally/organically.

So what is Dell missing besides services? Let’s take a look:

• Enterprise Management (and software): Even if OpenManage (Dell) could compete with System Insight Manager (HP), Dell doesn’t have an enterprise management story to tell. IBM has Tivoli. HP has OpenView. These software divisions are big business for HP and IBM. If Dell wants to compete, they should acquire BMC, CA, or Symantec. Perhaps the best choice is Symantec. Dell and Symantec already have a strategic partnership, plus Symantec has desktop and server management capabilities (through the Altiris acquisition), enterprise backup and volume management (Veritas), and anti-virus software that would compliment Dell’s desktop business.
• Enterprise Servers: Although x-86 servers make up a majority of the server market (especially in terms of units sold), for some applications, customers require systems that have a higher class of availability and performance. In this area, IBM and HP have products at the “mainframe” level (Z-Series and Superdome respectively) and the “workstation” level (P-Series/i-Series and Non-Stop/HP-UX respectively). Dell doesn’t. This problem is harder for Dell to solve. Perhaps Dell can wait for AMD and Intel to solve this product gap problem for them through the future scalability of the x86 server architecture. But another possible scenario is for Dell to acquire Sun (which could be had at a good price). This may sound like madness, but so did the HP/Compaq merger when Carly Firoina and Michael Capellas announced the plan in 2001. Today, the HP/Compaq merger is widely regarded as the right move because it gave HP the product portfolio and services it needed to compete with IBM in the enterprise. Dell needs the product punch and the enterprise brand credibility that Sun can provide.
• Enterprise Storage: A bright spot for Dell. Darren Thomas has this portion of the product group headed in the right direction. Dell has rebuilt the PowerVault brand back with a plethora of products from the NX1950 to the MD3000i. The EqualLogic acquisition was the right move because it gives Dell an enterprise iSCSI storage platform. But Dell’s messaging around iSCSI is lackluster, and they run the risk of being eclipsed by Cisco’s march toward FCoE. In addition, it’s painfully obvious that Dell’s relationship with EMC isn’t going to last forever. The EMC relationship, in some ways, hurts Dell’s enterprise credibility. Customers don’t give Dell the credit (that they probably deserve) in enterprise storage because they feel that Dell has “partnered” their way to the enterprise rather than built it (or acquired it) themselves. Dell must continue to quietly replace their EMC product line, and at the same time, acquire storage technology that will build on their EqualLogic acquisition – such as storage management, data management, and data protection

Look, I’m not saying Dell is going away. Far from it. They have a solid place inside many data centers. But Dell must address their brand perception issue or face serious future problems. I’m not the only one who is asking the Dell question. Check out Henry Blodget's interview with Aaron Task on Yahoo Finance.

Dell – you changed the IT game once. The competition has reacted and turned the tables. Now, it’s your move.

[Posted by: Drue Reeves]

Is the Emperor Under Dressed?

Today, Dell became the third x86 server vendor to deliver a rack mount servers specifically optimized for server virtualization workloads. To understand the difference between a standard server lets look compare the new PowerEdge 805 with the PowerEdge 2950 III, both support two processors with up to four cores each and occupy the same amount of space in a rack. What separates them is the memory and I/O capacity:

	PowerEdge 805	PowerEdge 2950 III
Memory slots	16	8
Maximum memory	128 GB	32 GB (Dell doesn't offer 8GB DIMMs for the 2950 III)
PCIe 8x	3 slots	2 slots
PCIe 4x	1 slot	1 slots
Onboard Ethernet I/F	4 x 1Gbit/s	2 x 1Gbit/s

So that's four times the memory, 40% more I/O bandwidth, and double the number of networking interfaces in the same rack footprint. What I find particularly interesting about these "optimized" servers is what they say about blade servers as a virtualization platform, consider the PE 805 compared to Dell's two processor blade:

	PowerEdge 805	PowerEdge M605
Memory slots	16	8
Maximum memory	128 GB	32 GB (Dell doesn't offer 8GB DIMMs for the 2950 III)
PCIe 8x	3 slots	2 slots
PCIe 4x	1 slot
Onboard Ethernet I/F	4 x 1Gbit/s	2 x 1Gbit/s

The PE 805 still has the memory advantage, but the I/O throughput advantage is even more marked at a whopping 75%. So much for blades as a server virtualization platform!

If you listen to some of the x86 server vendors you could be forgiven for thinking that anybody that doesn't implement blades for their entire x86 server infrastructure, is not only doing them self a disservice, but also endangering the entire planet through their profligate use of energy. If you talk to customers though, you get a very different story; many of them have serious concerns including:

• The density myth: achieving anything close the theoretical density of blade servers is nigh on impossible given limits of power distribution and cooling in most data centers. Hands up all the data center managers who are delivering 20-30 Kwatts of power to each rack? I had one customer using a co-lo that was talking about energy densities of 1000w/ square foot. Given the amount of space around a rack that translates to about 9Kw of power available for each rack. 9Kw is about enough power for one or two (if you're really lucky) fully populated blade chassis, in a rack that can physically hold four or five blade chassis.
• The consolidation myth: I've talked to several customers about data center consolidation, and blades always come up as a topic of conversation. But consider this; if the plan is to move workloads from conventional servers to an equivalent number of blades, then very little consolidation is actually achieved. Yes, the servers may have been geographically consolidated into a single data center, but any gains in power and cooling efficiency will be negligible. If the goal of consolidation is to centralize IT and to reduce the overall energy consumption, then server virtualization represents a much more attractive path. Consider the following example where twenty conventional servers are to be consolidated. Using just blades we go from twenty poorly utilized servers in remote locations to twenty poorly utilized blades in a central location, big deal! Throw server virtualization into the mix, where running ten virtual machines on a single server is very doable, then we end up with three efficiently utilized servers (assuming an N+1 failover cluster) in the central location. Clearly the latter approach will be much more efficient from an energy perspective, will consume less space in the data center, and will reduce the number of physical hosts being managed from twenty to three.

But surely blades must be good for something, other wise why have them? Let's consider three typical use cases:

• Server virtualization: Blades are fundamentally unsuited to large scale server virtualization projects because of limits in terms of memory and I/O scalability which place artificial constraints on how many VMs can be consolidated onto a single host. Even the vendors who are most forthright in their adoration for blades have tacitly admitted this by launching conventional servers optimized for server virtualization applications. The optimizations they make are telling. First, these new servers support very large memory footprints, especially compared to blades. Second, these optimized servers sport considerably more I/O bandwidth than blades or less well endowed rack mount servers. Examples of such server virtualization optimized platforms include the HP ProLiant DL785 and Dell’s recently announced PowerEdge R805 and PowerEdge R905 servers.
• High performance compute: At first glance, HPC seems like the "killer app" for blades. But if you dig in a little more it's not so clear. For example Dell was proud to announce a new HPC lab at Purdue University, but it was built from standard rack mount servers not blades . Similarly the Texas Advanced Computing Center has two Dell HPC configurations built from PowerEdge 1955 servers. Granted, the largest system at TACC is built using Sun's 4-core Opteron blade, but that barely qualifies as a blade system with respect to density since the exact same density could be achieved without blades.
• A future in the clouds: I hear a lot of talk about how blades are natural fit for cloud computing because of their density. Hmm, if so, then why isn't Google using blades in its data centers? Equally to the point, why did IBM just announce the iDataPlex (what genius came up with that name?) system specifically for this market. iDataPlex is built with half depth 1U rack mount servers with a nominal density of 80 servers in a rack along with water cooling and a small nuclear reactor (both of which are optional).

The truth is, blades are not the right choice for most environments, and customers should be very wary of any vendor or reseller that tells them anything different. If you don't mind a proprietary product that costs more to acquire and locks you into a single vendor while simultaneously limiting scalability and I/O throughput, then blades are just what you need, otherwise think long and hard before deploying them.

 

Posted by: Nik Simpson

Microsoft Unveils GSNW 2.0

The big news at today's Microsoft Management Summit was the unveiling of the System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008 beta, which includes the ability to manage VMware Virtual Infrastructure environments. Microsoft can call its VMware management capabilities whatever it wants, but I like to call it Gateway Services for NetWare (GSNW) 2.0. Why?

If you've followed Richard Jones' post Virtualization wars, what can VMware learn from the past, you probably see the analogy. GSNW provided interoperability between Windows and NetWare file serving environments, with an ultimate goal of facilitating NetWare to Windows migrations. Microsoft's addition of VMware virtual infrastructure support to VMM 2008 is fully analogous to GSNW. Adding VMware management support will get Hyper-V into organizations quicker, while familiarizing organizations with Microsoft's virtualization management stack. If all goes as planned, Microsoft believes that over time organizations will migrate off of the VMware ESX platform in favor of Hyper-V.

System Center provides management of the entire software stack: application, OS, hypervisor, and hardware. Hyper-V doesn't have to beat ESX feature-for-feature, as long as the technology is "good enough" and compliments Microsoft's management stack. Microsoft's System Center management solution will present a major challenge to VMware. After all, there's more to the data center than the virtual infrastructure. Management of physical resources, applications, and operating systems is equally as critical, and represents a clear distinction between the Microsoft management solution and that of VMware.

Microsoft's eventual dominance over NetWare has shown that great technology alone is not always enough. Ease of management and tightly integrated OS and application management is important to many organizations, and the release of the VMM 2008 beta, or GSNW 2.0, is Microsoft's first shot over VMware's bow.

Today Microsoft fully unveiled its plans and strategy for taking on VMware. Granted, Hyper-V has yet to ship, but its release is just months away. VMware has time on its side. Virtualization is a core infrastructure technology and it's not something you just rip and replace. VMware has a very loyal user base that trusts critical workloads to the VMware virtualization stack. That being said, Microsoft has shown its hand to VMware. VMware knows Microsoft's strategy, and it's now up to VMware to convince its devoted user base that VMware is the company that should both provide the hypervisor and manage the virtual environment. For VMware, this is not a time for over-confidence. VMware needs to make a compelling case as to why organizations should stick with their solution long term; otherwise, as Richard Jones had predicted, history will once again repeat itself.

Posted by: Chris Wolf

Recession. What to do?

The talk around thousands of water coolers and coffee machines across the nation rages about a very important topic - the economy.  Recently Jack Santos (one of our Executive Strategists) blogged  on this subject taking a look at what had happened in the past while overlaying the change in IT's position within businesses.

At Burton Group, we have all been discussing what's happening and we are postulating as to what it may mean for the future.  Ken Anderson, another Executive Strategist, made the following observation: 

During times of rapid growth, IT organizations focus on methods to deploy services as fast as possible to ensure they are not hampering the company's growth. They position their organization as the key corporate growth enabler.  A good analogy is that of laying train tracks as fast as possible in front of the corporate locomotive racing down those tracks.  However, in times of recession, corporate growth stalls, and heaven forbid, may even shrink.  At this point, what do IT organizations do?  IT is no longer tactically laying tracks as fast as they can.  The IT solutions and infrastructure that were built during expansive times were built as quickly as possible and not necessarily with a focus on cost efficiency and agility.  Now is the time to refocus IT efforts on strategic architecture.  During times of rapid growth, the balance of effort is on tactical rapid deployment compared to strategic initiatives.  During times of recession, the efforts should focus on strategic initiatives that prepare the organization and its IT architecture for future growth while containing immediate costs.

In this light, Data Center Strategies has focused our research efforts on those strategic architectures that lead to the Dynamic Data Center vision; agile computing to enable businesses to respond quicker and more cost effectively than ever before to changing market needs and opportunities.  In times of economic slowdown, competition is fiercest. In these times it is imperative that enterprises respond quickly to opportunities before competitors snap them up.  Agility is crucial.

This year at Burton Group's Catalyst Conference, DCS is focusing on agile initiatives with workshops in Server Virtualization, Business Continuity, and iSCSI deployment as well as session themes on Server Virtualization: Beyond Consolidation, Storage for the Virtual Data Center, Data Center Efficiency: Energized, Miniaturized and Highly Available, and Data Center Management Automation.  Furthermore, Burton Group's Consulting Services (BGCS) organization has recently added Rob Schafer, a noted META group analyst and data center veteran.  BGCS has outlined its strategic focus for Data Centers with the introduction of the Infrastructure and Operations Architecture and Sourcing  practice area.

So when your IT organizations are faced with changes in direction this year, Burton Group is ready to help you.

[Posted by Richard Jones]

Just-In-Time

Thin provisioning or to some “just-in-time” or dynamic provisioning of storage volumes – pick your favorite buzz word –is all the rage amongst RAID array vendors. In the good old days - last year in this business – when creating storage volumes for one of their charges, administrators assigned the total requested capacity for the volume up front. While this seemed simple enough, it required clairvoyant administrators to gaze into their crystal balls and foretell how much capacity will be needed - at least in the near future - no small feat in a large dynamic storage realm. Luckily, still back in the old days, the more capable raid systems, under the attentive administrator, could bloat the size of the volume on command after creation.

Unfortunately this meant valuable storage space lay waiting for fulfillment, unused and spinning away, slowly warming the planet. The attentiveness of a storage administrator directly related to the grandness of the excess capacity. Excess capacity lying in wait for months if not years. Tsk tsk, certainly not efficient and hardly a candidate for a green earth award.

Now, imagine if that busy storage administrator could hire some minimally paid buddies – interns will do – huddled around a storage array console watching those storage volumes fill. Boring indeed, but being ever eager to please – hey those interns need to impress to get a full time offer – those interns could make a storage volume far smaller than requested, keeping that tidbit secret, in fact just big enough to satisfy current needs. I mean, come on, everybody asks for more than they need. Am I right? Let those interns click away to manually expand the volumes as they fill, keeping their secret intact. Put a game theme on that dull management console to keep it interesting. So now what do we have? Volumes, highly utilized expanding as necessary to fill the dynamic need.

That’s thin provisioning.

But you ask, I was hoping you would, what of all those unused disks that are still spinning warming the earth? Ah, those clever interns, driven to wear summer garb in the storage array confines, figured they could pull those unused disks, saving power, and lowering the haughty temps in their meager work space. Then just before anyone notices – the call goes out and disks are plugged in just-in-time. Living on the edge, there’s actually more space allocated than energized hardware to support it. Those sneaky interns. Problem solved, the volume utilization is now sky high, power consumption is tracking utilization, the equipment room is no longer a sauna and the only limit is space to plug in disks when the need arises. It’s a good world.

Thin provisioning doesn’t do procurement.

Thin provisioning, like our interns, allocates additional bytes “just-in-time”. Unlike those clever interns, it does not procure and energize hardware “just-in-time”. What’s the point of just-in-time allocation if the hardware is already sitting there powered up? Yes there are some convenience factors like not having to guess capacities but the real payoff, the reason to buy the technology, is to optimize hardware utilization. Procuring hardware on a just-in-time basis is a crucial part of the proposition. Those interns had it right – no sense powering the equipment if it’s not being used.

Offer those interns a full time job and get that automated thin provisioning system. There’s plenty to pick from with clever features like auto tiered storage, replication and the like. And once that spunky clean hardware is in place, ask the equally clever interns in the procurement department to land hardware as you need it. Never too late – you wouldn’t want to run out of space – but just-in-time.

[Posted by Gene Ruth]

Citrix Simplifies Hypervisor Licensing

Today Citrix announced a new licensing model for its XenServer hypervisor. To summarize, XenServer 4.1 is now priced per server, with no restrictions on the number of VMs that run on the server, or the number of CPUs or CPU cores on the server. That's it. You don't have to count sockets, processors, or cores - just servers.

At VMworld Europe I was caught off guard by the amount of user angst regarding VMware's own licensing policies. Organizations were most upset by the fact that they are required to buy licenses in increments of 2 processors, but cannot split a 2 processor license across two physical servers. Organizations were also at odds with the ESX server installed instance-based licensing which required them to purchase duplicate licenses for their DR facility, even if a cold "backup" ESX server was offline. VMware CPU-based pricing and licensing is currently based on CPUs with up to four cores; VMware has noted that it will revisit its licensing policies once eight core CPUs become available.

Citrix didn't have to listen to VMware's customers to arrive at their current licensing and pricing policy. Instead, they could have asked anyone "What's the easiest licensing and pricing policy that we can offer you?" While I'm sure some would inevitably blurt out "free!" most would welcome a simple instance-based pricing model. With it's announcement, it's clear that Citrix has listened to its customers and is giving them exactly what they want. Of course, now the pressure is on Citrix's competitors and I'm eager to see how they will respond.

Citrix's change in licensing and pricing may involve more than your budget; it can also have significant implications on how you architect XenServer environments. The current pricing model clearly favors scale up, since going with larger servers (such as 4U) that can accommodate more VMs can save you substantial licensing dollars (compared to using double the number of 2U servers). I have always been a proponent of modest consolidation numbers (less than 20:1, with 8:1 to 15:1 being very common) since such as approach shortens high availability failover response and VM restart times following a failure. With cost factoring into the equation, you may find more organizations willing to live with a slightly longer failover response in order to cut XenServer licensing costs in half.

The hypervisor is an inevitable part of the x86 server platform moving forward and one day embedded hypervisors will be nearly as ubiquitous as the system BIOS. With such high volume of long term hypervisor sales, why not give up some potential revenue for the sake of management simplicity? That's what Citrix is saying. VMware, Microsoft, Virtual Iron, Novell, Red Hat, Oracle, Parallels - what do you have to say? It would be easy to state that Citrix is merely leveraging aggressive pricing in order to gain a competitive sales advantage. Following Citrix's lead would be a tough pill to swallow, certainly in regards to your short term licensing revenue. Long term, following Citrix may accelerate virtualization adoptions, especially in a time of financial uncertainty.

Posted by: Chris Wolf

SAP: Cornerstone sponsor at Novell's Brainshare

For a number of years conspiracy theorists have either forecasted the demise of Novell or the acquisition of Novell by another company.  For nearly a decade the IBM acquisition of Novell rumor each August became a running joke within the halls of Novell.

But at Brainshare 2008, SAP AG took the corner sponsorship position of the conference, and announced a deeper partnership with Novell in the opening keynote.  So conspirers are thinking that SAP has Novell in its acquisition targets.  So would this be a good idea?

The argument for:

Oracle has been moving out beyond the database over the past few years: Peoplesoft, Oracle Enterprise Linux, etc. are examples of these moves.  SAP needs to offer soup to nuts solutions as well.  A Novell acquisition would give SAP a Linux distribution, virtualization, data center and desktop management tools, and most importantly, identity and security tools. SAP would gain access to Novell's partner channels (a point that SAP took advantage of in their keynote Novell partnership announcement - any Novell partner can sign up to get 5% of any SAP revenue generated through a bundled product sale.)  Furthermore, tighter integration and common support for application plus operating system could help with IT management costs.

The argument against:

Novell has been the talk of acquisition for years, but the deal breaker is Novell's $1.8 billion cash in the bank. Novell would cost just over $4.5 billion (rough calculation of 3x revenues plus cash on hand.)  Additionally, what Novell partners would SAP anger through an acquisition?  Would an acquisition improve SAP's reach and competitiveness, or would maintaining a tight partnership with Novell yield more product and revenue growth for SAP?

Interested to hear what others have to say.

[Posted by Richard Jones]

What's in a name? ROM-based Hypervisors = Server

In the world of technology it’s important that we use like terminology to assist in technology comprehension and human absorption. Since the announcement of ROM-based hypervisors at last years VMworld conference, I have struggled with what to call them. I have heard some people call it a “hyperbox”, but to me, hyperbox seemed to speak more about the performance of the box or the activity within the box (ala hyper-threading). So, I began to fiddle with the name a little. My thoughts were of the Bugs Bunny cartoon where Bugs meets count Dracula who can change himself from a vampire into a bat (and back) using the words “abracadabra” and “hocus pocus”. Bugs mangles the two words into “abraca-pocus” and “hocus-cadabra” changing Dracula into part bat, part vampire. Here’s the Jibjab link: http://www.jibjab.com/view/164447

So, using this method, I came up with the word “ROMpervisor” and “HyperROM”. Richard chimed in and said “VIOS” (i.e. Virtual Input/Output System). None of these I really liked either. In the end, it’s probably a moot point, since almost every IHV will include a hypervisor in their platform. So next time someone tries to qualify a ROM-based hypervisor, perhaps we should just call it a “server”.

posted by: Drue Reeves

HP has a BIG baby

As part of HP's Monday announcements, they introduced a new server (ProLiant DL785 G5) which marks HP's reentrance into the 8-way x86-server market after pulling out in 2005. The specs for this new machine are pretty impressive...

• 8 x AMD Opteron "Barcelona" 4-core processors
• 64 (yes, you did read that correctly) DIMM sockets for memory, that's 256 GB of memory with 4 GB DIMMs, and 512 GB at some point in the not too distant future.
• 11 PCIe expansion slots (includes two 16x slots that can also be used for HTX accelerator cards in number crunching applications). Many of the slots are also PCIe rev 2.0 compliant which doubles the bandwidth.
• Up to 16 x 2.5" SAS disk drives (8-bays are standard, with 8 more as an option).

Impressive as these hardware specs are, the more interesting question is "why is HP getting back into a market that it previously abandoned?" That question itself has a number facets:

• Why leave in the first place? - 8-way x86 server design became a reality in the late 90s with Corollary's ProFusion chipset (originally designed for Pentium Pro, but ultimately shipped with XEON). There were other contenders at the time, Hyundai was one that I recall, and COMPAQ designed their own.  But there were two problems, first the designs didn't scale well because the shared memory architecture which meant that the 8-way boxes never really performed as advertised. The second was a market problem, there simply weren't many applications on Intel-based hardware that needed that sort of scalability which limited the size of the market and prevented commoditization. Put simply, it was a solution looking for a problem.
• What's changed? - First, AMD's Opteron design doesn't have a shared-memory bus, each processor has dedicated memory and I/O channels which should help a lot with scalability. Second, and perhaps more important from HP's perspective is that the market has changed. Now, with server virtualization, you can easily run multiple workloads on the box, so the issue of finding a single application that can do something useful an 8-way has changed dramatically. It's not one workload it's tens of virtual machines sharing the box.
• But aren't blades the future? - HP has spent a good deal of time telling us how wonderful blade-based servers are, so why come out with a system that is the very antithesis of blade style computing? The truth is, blades work well for some things, but if you are looking for really high consolidation rates as you virtualize workloads, you really can't beat a "honking big box" .

So HP rejoins a market that currently features Sun and IBM. Sun's 8-way is rather similar in basic architecture (i.e. Opteron-based) while IBM continues to push it Intel-based NUMA cluster (multiple 4-way servers with a high speed interconnect). It will be interesting to see if HP regains the market leadership it had before exiting the 8-way market?  I expect things to only get more competitive over time, particularly when Intel's Nehalem processor is available to support 8-way designs which I would expect by 2010 at the latest. My guess is that by 2011-2012 timeframe we have 8-way/8-core designs with hyperthreading for 128 processing threads which will be quite a beast! What a box of this caliber means for HP's Itanium systems, not too mention Sun's uSPARC and IBM's Power processors, is an interesting question that only time will answer.

 

Posted by: Nik Simpson

BMC Acquires Bladelogic

Things happen fast in this industry, if you're not careful, you can easily miss a key happening. This morning BMC has moved to acquire Bladelogic. This was predicted in the DCS VantagePoint document that is currently in our production process (i.e. we finished writing it several weeks ago, but the paper has to go through a copy edit and presentation polishing).

I applaud this move because BladeLogic's automation software will help boost BMC's data center management portfolio. In fact, the Bladelogic acquisition reminds me of the Opsware acquisition by HP, and may be a direct response to HP's move. But Like HP's acquisition of Opsware, BMC has lots of work to do to integrate their current product set with Bladelogic. First, HP had the problem of integrating their Mercury CMDB (from another acquisition) with the Opsware CMDB. Federation is their answer. BMC will have the same issue with Bladelogic's CMDB and BMC's Atrium CMDB. Next is product portfolio overlap and console convergence. If BMC cannot converge and reduce consoles within their portfolio, then they are simply giving customers one more console to the proliferation of consoles they already have in their environment. Finally, BMC has to be careful not to smother Bladelogic. Bladelogic made a name for themselves through workflow automation and infrastructure management. Administrators are tired of managing each device at a low level. Bladelogic helped free administrators from the chains of individual system management.  BMC may do well to consider integrating BMC's products into Bladelogic's automation and workflow engine rather than vice-versa.

So, who's next? Well, keep an eye on Opalis. They have a similar functionality set and could be a target for one of the remaining larger players such as CA or IBM Tivoli.

[posted by Drue Reeves]

Microsoft Ups the Ante on Virtual Desktops

Microsoft has been steadily adding chips to its arsenal for its much anticipated match of virtualization poker with VMware. Wednesday's announcement of Microsoft's intent to acquire Kidaro is their latest addition to a virtualization product portfolio that is quickly taking shape. Following yesterday's announcement, I have to wonder if some of the Microsoft folks are losing their poker faces in favor of a small smirk.

Before I get to Kidaro, I want to first backtrack and talk about what I saw as a very good move several months ago when Microsoft acquired Calista Technologies, announced January 21st. Calista's technology adds a great deal of efficiency to the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), and I believe Microsoft is thinking that with Calista they'll be able to rival Citrix's ICA protocol in terms of performance. ICA is a known commodity, and the Calista solution has yet to prove itself in production. However, Microsoft had to see something special in the Calista solution to snatch it up before Calista was even shipping a product. Microsoft sells software, and they're not about to get into the hardware business, so Calista is a great fit in terms of providing a software-based thin client. The cost of hardware thin clients (along with the volatility and consolidation in the virtual desktop space) have caused a number of organizations to hold off on deploying a virtual desktop infrastructure. But what if you could repurpose existing desktops as terminal devices using the Calista software? Now the cost of consolidating and virtualizing your desktop infrastructure drops significantly. Down the road, thin clients will be the predominant virtual desktop delivery platform, but a software-based thin client can allow organizations to transition to a virtual desktop infrastructure today with a modest investment.

Now onto Kidaro. I see this as another good move on Microsoft's part. The Kidaro acquisition allows Microsoft to directly compete with VMware's Assured Computing Environment (ACE) solution. For several years, I have seen VMware ACE as ideal for allowing mobile or remote users to securely connect to an organization's VPN. For political reasons and often to support legacy applications, many mobile users often have administrative rights to their system. While this allows them to install software they "need" to do their jobs, it also presents the risk of them installing malware on their systems. With ACE, you can centrally deploy a VM to mobile users and have the VM be the users' "work" system. Furthermore, you can leverage policies to lock down the VM and restrict the resources the VM can access. For example, you could configure the VM to only talk to a single VPN gateway address. You can also set via policy the ability to render a VM unbootable if it does not check-in within a certain number of days, thus mitigating the impact of a lost or stolen physical system. Kidaro is very similar in functionality to VMware ACE, and with Microsoft acquiring Kidaro I can easily see Kidaro's management policies transitioning to Group Policy Objects (GPOs). The ability to leverage GPOs to manage remote VMs will be very appealing to many organizations, and I would not be surprised to see VMware more tightly integrate ACE management with Windows GPOs in the future.

Of course, the tricky aspect of product acquisitions is getting them to play nice with your core management architecture. Microsoft has a good story going with System Center and I see System Center (and Active Directory) integration as crucial to the long term success of both of these acquisitions.

For months, talk around virtual desktops has centered around a two-horse race between VMware and Citrix. VMware is in the lead, and Citrix is beginning to come on strong. If you haven't noticed some of the back-and-forth between the vendors, I suggest you take a look at Citrix CTO Simon Crosby's blog or the VMware blogs Virtual Reality or A Little Truth (by VMware's Mike Dipetrillo). The fact that both vendors are paying so much attention to each other clearly shows that each is acknowledging the other as a competitor.

Microsoft's recent acquisitions is an obvious indication that they are not ready to concede the virtual desktop space to competitors, or even friendly partners like Citrix. And why should they? The virtual desktop market is the least penetrated of today's x86 virtualization solutions. My four year old son loves the story of the Turtle and the Hair, with its theme of slow and steady wins the race. Microsoft has been slow and steady in the evolution of their virtualization solution, and we all have to wonder if that will allow them to ultimately win the virtualization race.

VMware, Citrix, Virtual Iron, Novell, Sun, Parallels - what do you think? Microsoft has upped the ante. Do you already have enough on the table, or is it time to go out and get another chip? Do you want to show your poker face, or perhaps are you ready to tip your hand? If your answer is the latter, I welcome your comments.

Posted by: Chris Wolf

Last of the Mohicans - Death Greatly Exaggerated...

Drue stated his position on operating systems in "Last of the Mohicans" last week.If he's right, things certainly look bleak for increasing marginalized operating systems, but I don't think he is right. Much of Drue's blog was a point by point response to the arguments I put forward in "Ticket to Ride" and I think his points are worthy of rebuttal. First, on hardware changes Drue contends that Microsoft can get by with service pack type upgrades. Leaving aside the issue of whether customers want service packs to contain new features (as opposed to concentrating on fixing what's broken), I think there are flaws to the argument...

• Accommodating new hardware - finding a way to make optimal use of a new generation of massively parallel servers isn't like supporting a new SCSI controller. Supporting a Serial Attached SCSI controller is trivial, to the OS it just looks like any other SCSI controller, the host doesn't care whether it's using a serial or parallel implementation of the SCSI protocol,. Same goes for MPIO, just another layer inserted inserted the I/O stack.  I believe that making the most of the next generation of hardware will take much more than changing the "Number_CPUs" in a header file and recompiling the kernel. Drue also asked the question about whether there was a 1000 processor, exabyte memory system in our future anytime soon. I'd say no, but a 128-core, terabyte memory system is just around the corner (2010 would be my guess), and that's a substantially different class of system to anything Windows has ever run on before, and I expect the OS will have to evolve accordingly.
• Application support - application vendors are slow to transition to new hardware architectures and Drue challenged us to name native Windows 64-bit applications. OK, how about Exchange 2007 which only runs on 64-bit Windows? I'm sure there are other ISVs with native 64-bit Windows applications, after all 64-bit Windows is getting on for a decade old (I went to the NT64 "kickoff" meeting in Redmond in 1998). Traditionally the 16-32bit and 32-64bit transitions have been slow for every hardware architecture, but based on previous examples such as MIPs and SPARC, I'd say Windows is on track.
• Modularity and the rise of the hypervisor - the question here is whether server virtualization fundamentally changes the way we use operating systems and there role in the infrastructure. In his blog, Drue suggests that VMware would like operating systems to remain constant and subsume more of the functionality for managing hardware into the virtualization layer. That seems directly at odds with the way things are going. Today, the hypervisor is actually trying to get out of the way of the operating system when it comes to dealing with hardware, so much of the onus for adapting to new hardware will remain on the operating system.

On the subject of revenue streams and Windows releases, I'm going to have to take issue with the idea that Windows 2008 took five years to produce. The fact is that MS took at least two years out of that working on Windows Server 2003 R2 which had some substantial changes, so it's at least 1.5 operating systems in 5 years which is about par for the course in my opinion.

In addition to his responses to my points, Drue also raised a couple of other issues:

1. The threat of Google - I think the industry makes too much of this, Google has done great job at building the world's best search engine, but it's forays into other areas haven't exactly set the world alight. Hands up anybody considering replacing Microsoft Word with one of Google's web applications for the enterprise? Online applications and "cloud computing" are mostly vapor at the moment so there's a lot of scope for an OS vendor to carve out a segment for best cloud computing OS, and I wouldn't count Microsoft out.
2. Slow adoption for new operating systems - Drue points to the slow adoption of Vista as evidence that corporations won't embrace Windows Server 2008. To a degree he's right, I don't expect Windows Server 2008 to be a majority of Windows Server shipments for at least 18 months. But it will inevitably supplant Windows Server 2003 at some point, just as Vista will ultimately displace XP.

Interestingly, Microsoft's tipped its hand on the future of operating systems last week by releasing a research version of a next generation operating system called Singularity. Singularity is a radical departure from just about any operating system that has gone before, it's not a minor rethink of the Windows kernel, it's a ground-up re-design, and not before time. If you look at widely used commercial operating systems, most can trace their design lineage back to MULTICS in the mid-60s, that's more than 40 years! Even Windows NT which is less than 20-years old owes more to DEC's VMS (a design from the mid-70s) than to any modern design. So there's plenty of scope for improving performance, scalability, security, and modularity of operating systems. If you want to know more about Singularity, there's excellent overview whitepaper here. So suffice to say, I think there's still quite a few Mohicans left out there in the woods of Redmond (and elsewhere for that matter.)

Anyway, enough for now, I'll sign off by making some predictions, so y'all can come back in 2012 and marvel at my prescience (or laugh at me)

• Business as usual  - Windows Server 2012 enters beta test late next year and ships in late 2011, followed by Windows Server 2016 (I hope they think of a more imaginative naming scheme)
• Throwaway hypervisors - Hypervisors, not operating systems get commoditized over the next few years. I believe that the real scope for innovation in server virtualization resides in hardware advances such as PCI I/O virtualization, and at the virtual machine management layer not the hypervisor which is destined to become the 21st century BIOS.
• Cloud computing - Operating systems for cloud computing are not just stranger than we imagine today, they are stranger than we can imagine. There's lots of work going on in this area, but's too early to say what the end result will be in anything more than the broadest terms. For more on Microsoft's thinking around cloud computing and its impact, see Ray Ozzie's recent interview.
• Microkernels make a comeback - The idea of microkernel operating systems have been around for a while, but haven't caught on in commercial implementations. I suspect that the new generation of hardware may change this and that we'll see a successful server-grade commercial microkernel in the next decade.

 

Posted by: Nik Simpson

Windows Server 2008: Is It Worth It?

Its been only a few short days since Windows Server 2008 became commercially available. So is Windows Server 2008 worth the upgrade?  Or are most Windows customers happy with Windows Server 2003 R2?  This is a tough time for Microsoft.  Windows Server 2003 R2 is a very good release; a hard act to follow.  When you have a product that works well, people don't like to mess with it.  In their minds, the risk of breaking something is greater than the perceived value one can obtain from the newer version.

The answer to these questions invariably are "it depends".  But I'm of the opinion that most users will be pushed into upgrading as a result of Microsoft's support lifecycle as Windows Server 2003 enters extended support and end-of-life phases beyond mainstream.  Not near as many customers will be pulled into upgrading by the new features only available in Windows server 2008.  There really aren't any huge sweeping changes in Windows Server 2008.  For those upgrading, this is actually good - less churn means less risk.  What is new that people should be interested in?

• Security enhancements: Many enhancements with probably the biggest being the role based installation and server core feature, this feature yields a reduced attack surface with the side benefit of reduced patching required per server hopefully yielding a more robust system.  (Note:  Microsoft has added more fine-grained security settings that can actually reduce security when left in the hands of the untrained due to the added complexity.)

• Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC): Completely new such that the single points of failure in the older system are eliminated.

• Installation Services: Includes a new image format that can be compressed for quicker remote or unattended installations.

• 64-bit support: This support is now core to the operating system, whereas Windows 2003 64-bit was built after (the first Opteron shipped after Windows Server 2003 released).

Notice that I didn't mention Hyper-V.  It has not officially shipped yet, but when it does, I'm sure Chris Wolf will have plenty to say.

If you look at the features I've listed, you'll see that for most smoothly running Windows Server 2003 installations that have ample perimeter security in the data center network, there isn't any compelling drive to upgrade.  However, for those troublesome Windows Server 2003 installations, Windows Server 2008 is worth exploring to determine if it can reduce your woes.  For those customers who have experienced more downtime than they had anticipated due to security issues, Windows Server 2008 may offer some relief.  I'll couch that comment with the need for training on the new features so that they are leveraged properly.  One could install Windows Server 2008 just as Windows Server 2003 was installed and not see any benefit.  For those customers running Microsoft Cluster Server (MSCS) and having cluster stability problems, I would recommend moving to WSFC.  Again, training is in order, and due to the dramatic changes (a complete re-write), there is no simple migration path from MSCS to WSFC.  For those customers running compute and memory intensive applications, the 64-bit version of those applications on Windows Server 2008 64-bit may be in order (especially if you need the features in Exchange 2007 - it only runs on the 64-bit version.)

For the rest of you that will be pushed into upgrading, take a close look at the support options Microsoft offers.  Leveraging extended support until your current hardware running Windows Server 2003 needs replacing AND you have sufficiently tested your systems on Windows Server 2008 is definitely in order.

The bottom line:  Its only a short 2 years and change until Windows Server 2003 enters extended support.  Get Windows Server 2008 into your labs NOW and start exploring it to see what it can do for you, and to find where your application "gotchas" are located.  You'll need to move there eventually.  (OK so you Linux shops are saying: "just move to Linux."  That sounds much simpler than it is in practice.  When you have a whole eco-system built around Windows, its very difficult to make a move like that, let alone just the move to the next Windows version.)

[Posted by Richard Jones]

VMworld Europe Takeaways - ESX 3i's Untold Story

Let me start by saying that I see embedded hypervisors as a large part of server virtualization's future. Embedded hypervisors run from energy efficient flash memory as opposed to a local hard disk, and they contain a smaller code base and minimal driver set, thus limiting their overall attack profile.

At VMworld Europe, several VMware independent hardware vendor (IHV) partners announced availability of VMware's embedded hypervisor, ESX 3i, on their server platforms. You'll find more information on vendor support in this VMware press release - VMware Announces Agreements to Embed VMware ESX 3i Hypervisor Across Broad Lines of Servers from Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, HP and IBM.

For many VMware shops, ESX 3i's small size and small attack profile may be more fantasy than reality. The problem with ESX 3i is the present reality of many large ESX environments, many of which incorporate third party applications in their ESX management stack. ESX 3i's preferred management methodology is via VMware's SDK, as ESX 3i does not have the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 3 based console OS that's common to traditional ESX server deployments. The console is an issue for many third party vendors in the VMware ecosystem because their applications are designed to run on the ESX console OS. Several application vendors that I spoke with at VMworld stated that it will be several months before their applications can exclusively manage an ESX server remotely via the SDK. In the interim, they will continue to require the ESX console in order to manage ESX server. That means that if you purchase an ESX 3i-based server, you're going to need to install the ESX console anyway. Remember that it's the absence of the console that gives ESX 3i its primary security benefits. So you're not going to be able to realize the full benefits of ESX 3i until all third party applications that you use to manage ESX environments fully support managing ESX via the SDK.

If you're evaluating ESX management applications for an ESX 3i deployment, the question at the top of your list for each application vendor should be "How do you interact with ESX? Do you use the SDK exclusively or do you require the ESX console?" If the vendor requires the console and you wish to deploy ESX 3i as it was intended (without the RHEL 3-based ESX console), then you'll likely have to rule out some ESX management vendors in the short term. VMware is committed to supporting the ESX console OS for another two years, so third party ESX management vendors have plenty of time to update their products. If you view the ESX console OS as a security liability that you'd rather not have to install, then you should push third party ESX management vendors to exclusively support the VMware SDK as quickly as possible.

VMworld Europe Takeaways - Storage VMotion Backlash

At VMworld Europe last week, it did not take long for me to realize that storage vendors were not exactly singing Storage VMotion's praises. Instead, many storage vendors were still feeling Storage VMotion's sting. Why should they care about a new storage value-add in ESX 3.5? Vendors that offer storage virtualization as an integral part of their products have seen one of their key value-adds move to the ESX hypervisor and as a result see Storage VMotion as a threat to their bottom line. Most storage vendors I spoke with see VMware's competitors (namely Microsoft, Citrix, and Virtual Iron) as opportunities where they can partner with a virtualization vendor and still offer a valuable piece of the virtualization puzzle. That's not to say these vendors are jumping off the VMware bandwagon, yet. But they are dipping their toes in the waters of other virtualization vendors.

With Storage VMotion, VMware was clearly responding to customer demand for a feature that allows back-end storage management with no impact on running VMs, while increasing the value of their hypervisor. While that's all good, it's easy to see why many of VMware's storage partners would take offense.

Continually adding value to the hypervisor is a key part of VMware's long term strategy, but where do they draw the line? Some in the virtualization community want VMware to go further. Take my friend Andrew Kutz's recent blog, for example - Coming soon: Application High Availability (AHA). Andrew believes that integrating application monitoring and application-level HA into VMware VirtualCenter management is a foregone conclusion. For VMware's sake, I hope that's not the case. VMware's addition of Storage VMotion has already begun to alienate some of its storage partners. With that being the case, how do you think vendors in the management space would feel about VMware adding application monitoring and orchestration to the VirtualCenter suite? My guess is that management software vendors such as BMC, HP, IBM, and Opalis would not look favorably on such a move.

VMware is at a crossroads, which is really hard to believe since it is the dominant market leader. VMware's competition will be front and center in 2008, and while VMware does need to continue to innovate around its hypervisor, they cannot afford to alienate many of the partners that helped get them to where they are today. The line that VMware should not cross may have been drawn in sand and easy to see at some point, but today that line is under a mud puddle and difficult to distinguish. Richard Jones recently articulated VMware's dilemma in his blog Virtualization Wars, what can VMware learn from the past? and it's my hope that VMware will learn from the past mistakes of other vendors.

I love Storage VMotion and see back end storage transparency as an integral part of the automated data center. The question we all have to answer, however, is whether storage transparency should be delivered by vendors in the storage ecosystem or by the server virtualization vendors. History has shown us that while vendors continually try to own the application stack and offer end-to-end data center solutions, reality has shown us that every data center is built around a mix of technologies from disparate vendors. VMware's success will not just be determined by its own bottom line, but by the success of its key partners as well.