Data Center Strategies

Novell Going Private?

Recent email from Ron Hovsepian to customers:

Dear Customer:

I wanted to contact you personally to address recent news about Novell.

Late Tuesday, March 2, Novell received an unsolicited, conditional proposal from Elliott Associates, L.P. to acquire Novell for $5.75 per share in cash. Elliott is an investment firm that holds shares of Novell stock. As you will see in our news release, we anticipate Novell's Board of Directors will review Elliott's proposal in consultation with Novell's financial and legal advisors. Beyond that, it is business as usual for us at Novell.

Our customers remain a top priority. We are privileged to work with tens of thousands of customers worldwide, and providing you the best possible products and services is our primary focus. Our employees and partners remain committed to helping you get the most out of your Novell investment. Our business is strong and I am confident about our future.

I am personally grateful for the trust and confidence you have placed in Novell. Please do not hesitate to contact me or members of my team at any time if you have questions about the road ahead.

Thank you for your continued support and business.

Sincerely,

Ron Hovsepian
President and CEO

Hmmmm. Why would Mr. Hovsepian tell customers this news?

Perhaps the best alternative for Novell investors...or will this email trigger a bidding war for Novell? Novell has had several suitors over the years...IBM, HP to name a few. Will they try again? There are other companies that could benefit from Novell's technology...VMware comes to mind (Platespin, SuSE as a guest OS and complement to SpringSource, Xen, ZENWorks, eDirectory), but VMware probably doesn't have the cash.

Novell has always had good technology, no doubt...but the "strategy du jour" that has plagued Novell over the past 15 years has really led them to this point.

More on this from DCS later. Stay tuned...

[posted by: Drue Reeves]

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words on HA/DR

If there's one constant in an analyst's life, it's travel. When you travel as much as we do, you begin to become very familiar with airports. I make it a habit to observe the IT equipment in every airport (terminal consoles, wireless access points, etc) because I like to get a sense of what the airport IT department is dealing with and how up to date they are. You can tell a lot about the airport based on their IT infrastructure.

Well, the other day I was walking through a well-known airport (I won't say which one), and I snapped a picture of what is probably one of the worst IT blunders I've ever seen. But the really funny part is the picture is -- in a microcosm -- the way we all think of IT high availability. Here's the pic:

 

So yes, that is a server rack, full of running IT equipment (red circle), in the public exit pathway, with no security guard in sight (green circle)....and an "unplug" sign in the background (yellow circle). Too funny!

Got me to thinking...

Isn't this the way we treat HA/DR in many of the data centers today? We put the IT equipment in a risky situation, accessible to lots of people (usually via a network), with no security measures in place, and signs that tell you exactly how to bring it down.

HA/DR should not be an afterthought. As Richard Jones (our service director) would say "Executive management must take fiduciary responsibility for HA and DR. It must be driven from the top, practiced, and reviewed on a regular basis".

He's right...

Remember, you can chat with Richard, myself, Chris Wolf, or Nik Simpson regarding HA/DR, virtualization, cloud computing, data center cost initiatives at Catalyst Europe in Prague April 19th -22nd. The promotion code for the early bird registration price of €995 is "INSIDER".

[posted by: Drue Reeves]

Catalyst Europe: Our Best Lineup Ever

As many of you know, Catalyst is Burton Group's  premiere enterprise IT event. For the analysts, Catalyst is the culmination of hours of hard work packed into 3+ content-laden days. For the attendees, Catalyst is a wealth of in-depth information delivered in waves of 30 minute presentations...it's like drinking from an IT information fire hose. For those of you who have attended Catalyst before, you know what I'm talking about. Veteran attendees also know that Burton Group offers special pricing promotions through our blog posts. Well, this year is no different. Register using the promotion code "INSIDER" and you'll receive a discounted price of €999.00.

Now normally, Catalyst Europe is held in October. This year however, Burton Group decided to move Catalyst Europe to April to better align with our attendees schedules (many attendees are just coming back from holiday in October). What does that mean? Well, for the research teams, the date shift has given us 6 additional months to prepare, research, and refine our content for the show. For Burton Group, Catalyst is the place where we set some clear stakes in the ground, meet customers face-to-face, and focus our research...it's a cathartic process. So to me, it feels like Burton Group is bursting at the seams with the best content we've had in years.

This year, the Data Center Theme/Track is "Virtualization: Transforming IT Infrastructure" and will focus on building out the dynamic data center and internal clouds. There are two session topics in these track:

• Virtualized Data Centers: Servers, Storage, Networks and Security -- The sessions in this topic will focus on building internal clouds using server virtualization and address the implications on security, storage, networks, and management.
• Getting Started with Client Virtualization --These sessions will help customers understand the various client virtualization options, the current state of the client virtualization technology, and how enterprises can build start a client virtualization pilot.

In addition, we are introducing our newest service -- cloud computing -- to Catalyst Europe. Although Burton Group launched our Cloud Computing service in April 2009, Catalyst EU 2010 will be the first time we've had a chance to address cloud computing to our European customers.

Cloud computing is quickly moving beyond the definitional phase, that is why this year's theme is "Enterprise Ready Clouds: Realistic Strategies". We feel that customers are attempting to devise a realistic cloud adoption strategy and searching for enterprise ready cloud solutions that can meet enterprise application requirements. The Cloud Computing track has 3 cloud topics with some fascinating sessions including:

• Leveraging the Cloud: What's Possible, What' s Not -- The sessions in this topic are focused on helping customers devise a viable cloud adoption strategy including the steps toward developing a cloud strategy, cloud security, cloud liability and risk management, data compliance in the cloud and leveraging cloud to achieve business objectives.
• Building and Using Cloud Infrastructure --These sessions will target hardware Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) technologies, risk and pitfalls, current state of the art and vendor options and connecting internal clouds to external.
• Applications and Data in the Cloud: Why, When, and How -- This topic will take an in-depth look at Platform and Software as a service (PaaS, SaaS), cloud application development, and cloud data management.

As research director, I couldn't be more pleased with the content we're producing this year. The topics and sessions we're offering delve into some of the most fascinating subjects in enterprise computing today. In my opinion, this year's Catalyst will be our best content yet. Hope to see you in Prague!

Thoughts on the VMworld Day 2 Keynote

I was very impressed by the information disseminated in the second VMworld keynote, led by CTO Steve Herrod. Here’s a summary of the thoughts I tweeted during the morning keynote (in chronological order).

• Steve Herrod talked about a "people centric" approach. VMware's technology needs to understand desktop user behavior. The existing offline VDI model (requiring a manual “check-out”) is not people centric.
• VMware’s announcement to OEM RTO Software’s Virtual Profiles was a good move. Burton Group considers profile virtualization a required element of enterprise desktop virtualization architecture.
• VMware’s Steve Herrod and Mike Coleman discussed VMware’s software-based PC-over-IP (PCoIP) protocol. Feedback from Burton Group clients who were early PCoIP beta testers indicates that the protocol’s development is progressing well.
• Herrod showed a picture of "hosted virtualization" for employee owned PCs on a MacBook. Is that a hint of a forthcoming announcement?
• I would like to know if VMware’s Type I CVP client hypervisor will have VMsafe-like support in the 1.0 release. VMware has made few public statements regarding CVP architecture.
• VMware’s CVP demo looked good, but it didn’t reach the “wow factor” achieved by Citrix when Citrix demoed a type I client hypervisor on a Mac at their Synergy conference.
• The Wyse PocketCloud demonstration was impressive. PocketCloud is VMware’s first answer to the Citrix Receiver for iPhone.
• VMware demonstrated the execution of a Google Android application on a Windows Mobile-based smart phone. Many opportunities exist for VMware and Google to collaborate in the user service and application delivery space.
• Burton Group client experience backs VMware’s claims that vSphere 4.0 is a suitable platform for tier 1 applications. We recommend that x86 virtualization be the default platform for all newly deployed x86 applications, unless an application owner can justify why physical hardware is required (e.g., for a proprietary interface that is unsupported by virtualization).
• To support tier 1 application dynamic load balancing, storage and network I/O must be included in the DRS VM placement calculations. It’s good to see that VMware is heading in that direction. DRS will also need to evaluate non-performance metrics such as vShield Zone membership as part of the VM placement metric (no word on this yet).
• I would like to hear more from folks who have tested AppSpeed. Burton Group clients I have spoken with to date have not been impressed.
• The DMTF needs to start doing more to evangelize the role of OVF as it pertains to cloud computing and service manifests.
• I like vSphere’s VMsafe security API, but I want to see tighter integration with external management (exposed via the SDK), and better integration with VMware’s DRS and DPM services.
• VMware talked about Lab Manager as a tool to promote user self-service for server VMs and applications, but I haven’t heard mention of a similar interface for desktop applications (like Citrix Dazzle). A user application service catalog is a missing part of VMware’s current virtual desktop architecture, and will need to be addressed by either VMware or a third party.
• The data center on the show floor running 37,248 VMs on 776 physical servers would be more impressive if VMware disclosed the applications running on the VMs, along with the application workloads. Otherwise, the demonstration is really just a density science project.
• I liked VMware’s coverage of virtual data centers. They are also defined in Burton Group’s internal cloud hardware infrastructure as a service (HIaaS) reference architecture.
• Herrod mentioned forthcoming network L3 improvements that will make it easier to separate location and identity. This is something to follow.
• Both Cisco and F5 are enablers for VMware’s long distance VMotion and are vendors to follow as this technology further matures.
• VMware’s cloud layered architecture is very similar to the architecture defined in the Drue Reeves’ report “Cloud Computing: Transforming IT.”
• Herrod did a great job articulating the importance of SpringSource to the VMware software solution. VMware needs an application platform to have a chance at holding off Microsoft long term, and SpringSource gives them that.

That’s it for my thoughts on day 2. As always, I’d love to hear your feedback. VMworld 2009 was a great conference. I enjoyed my time meeting with Burton Group clients as well as the several conversations that I had with many attendees. See you next year!

VMware Submits vCloud API to DMTF

Today, VMware and the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) announced that the vCloud API has been submitted to the for work within the DMTF's VMAN initiative toward becoming an industry standard. You can view the spec here.

The idea is to create a standard RESTful API that cloud vendors can use as the interface to their service...ala EC2 API.

My take: This is goodness for the industry and may spark a wave of cloud management application development. However, the measure of a standard is adoption. I mean, if a standard is developed in the forest and no one adopts it, does it make a sound...or is it a standard? History tells us that standards adoption from the DMTF has been mixed (see DASH and SMASH), but on the other hand, vCloud API is closely tied to OVF -- one of the DMTF's more successfully adopted standards, so only time will tell.

It also remains to be seen if vCloud will become the cloud standard or if the EC2 APIs will become the defacto standard. In fact, Eucalyptus has already adopted the EC2 APIs, reinforcing EC2 API's defacto leadership.

The real key is VMware's army of vCloud partners. The more cloud vendors that adopt the API (say Terremark, Verizon, etc) the more pressure they place on non-compliant vendors to adopt the API. In this way, VMware could flip the tables on Amazon, making the EC2 API look proprietary.

In any event, this announcement is leadership by the DMTF and VMware in the cloud space and a key API to watch.

Posted by: Drue Reeves

VMware and Microsoft: Can't We all Just Get Along?

Last year, I blogged about Microsoft's stunt at VMworld -- passing out business cards entitled "VMwareCostsWayTooMuch.com" (with a $1 chip from the Venetian, I might add). If you recall, Microsoft contended that they tried to gain additional visibility at the conference through the "normal" sponsorship channels at VMworld (sponsoring lunches, banners, and the like), only to be headed off by VMware.

The blog stated:

"Even if VMware did keep Microsoft's visibility artificially down, this is not the way to get VMware to change their stance (after all -- it is their conference). If anything, it had the opposite effect."

And...

It's obvious there is a need for another vendor-neutral virtualization conference in the market. Microsoft feels constrained, and I know there are others (although to their credit, they didn't pull the same stunt).

Well here we are at VMworld 2009...game on. VMware, in response has placed more restrictions on VMworld sponsorship, including confining competing vendors to a measly 10x10 booth, restricting sponsors to not hold other virtualization events within a 50 mile radius (see Rich Crusco's blog) of VMworld, and inhibiting competing vendors to hold conference rooms at local hotels (see Simon Crosby's blog).

Of course, it's hard to blame VMware. After all, it's their show. VMWorld has always been a VMWare event. If you have any doubt, take a look at the conference sessions. What's the breakdown of VMware vs. non-VMware sessions? Who are the keynote speakers?  So, let's not beat up VMware too much.

Unfortunately, its the virtualization customer who suffers. Customers who want more information regarding hyper-V or XenServer, will simply have to attend additional conferences such as Microsoft's Tech-Ed or Citrix Synergy. While not optimal, it's not VMware, Microsoft or Citrix's fault. It's no one's fault. It's just a competitive reality in our industry. In fact, if you look at other conferences, the owning vendor enacts some of the same restrictions on participating vendors that VMware does at VMworld.

But the question is, what should VMware do? How should VMworld evolve in order to enhance the customer experience and allow the event to grow without giving up messaging and marketing control?

This situation reminds me of what happened to Novell and Networld+Interop. As many of you know, Networld was a Novell-owned show and merged with Interop in an attempt to create a larger industry-wide event. It worked. N+I became extremely popular and eventually became the "networking" show - outgrowing all but the biggest of conference centers. Inevitably, Novell faced the same issues as VMware does with VMworld...competitors where showing up, sporting their wares, making competitive statements and such. At the same time, there was clear demand for a NetWare centric conference. Novell was faced with a dilemma, keep N+I a vendor-neutral conference and start a NetWare specific conference or throw their weight around and make N+I a Novell conference. Kudos to Novell for keeping N+I open... the conference, industry, and attendee benefited greatly. However, Novell eventually created Brainshare, to meet customer demand. Now, it's easy to arm-chair quarterback and say, "Well Novell chose the wrong path". Maybe, maybe not. Brainshare is still a very successful Identity Management event and it's hard to know if Novell's product and strategy message would have been lost on the bigger N+I stage. Certainly, Novell would not have maintained the same level of control.

Based on what I'm seeing this year, VMware is making a clear choice. VMworld is a VMware event...and will remain so. Probably a prudent move by VMware, but I think they could loosen some of the restrictions and enhance the VMworld experience for the attendee -- which will only make the conference grow -- without losing control. And maybe that's the message for VMware...drop some of the restrictions and take the high ground. You're the leader...be the leader. It only hurts the conference in the long run. The message to participating vendors (*cough* Microsoft *cough*): Don't disparage the host...it's not cool and appears a bit desperate.

One thing is clear (as I stated earlier)...there is room in this market for a vendor-neutral virtualization conference. Could VMware help to start this idea?

posted by: Drue Reeves

VMWorld Run Grows

Careful what you wish for. Sometimes when you have an idea, it can spread like wildfire. I'll bet the PR folks at VMware never thought some of the biggest social media play at VMworld would be for the fun run.

 

Count me in that group. When I posted the VMWorld 10k/5k post a few days ago, I thought, ehhhh, no one will read this. Boy, was I wrong. Seems everyone on Twitter is talking about this 5k/10k fun run at VMworld on Monday night at the Golden Gate Bridge.

 

Getting into the spirit of the event, Burton Group marketing mocked up these cool running shirts (wicked like UnderArmor). Here's a peek. As it turns out, we'll have extras. So, if you’d like a shirt, BG will pass out the extras on a first come, first serve basis.

 

 

 

Anyway, hope to see you there.

 

Posted by: Drue Reeves

VMWorld 5k/10k Run

All work and no play makes virtualization people very geeky...OK, bad example. But at VMWorld 2009 this year, VMware and several other vendors are going to help us "geeks" have some fun by sponsoring a 10K/5K run at the Golden Gate bridge. The run will take place Monday, August 31, 2009 @ 6:30 PM, (Shuttles will be provided from Moscone Center to the bridge and back), and it only costs $10 bucks (you get a T-shirt).  You can register and get the details here.

Several of the Burton Group folks are participating, including Chris Wolf, Collin Searle and myself. Come join us!

posted by: Drue Reeves

SpringSource: VMware’s well-timed Acquisition

On Monday VMware announced that they will acquire SpringSource – a move that I believe was both essential and astute.

Let’s start with essential. Sure – it’s hard to argue against VMware’s merits as a hardware infrastructure-as-a-service (HIaaS) platform for both internal and external clouds. Note that for more information on cloud platforms and definitions, Drue Reeves’ paper “Cloud Computing: Transforming IT" is a great place to start. Living at the bottom of the stack (i.e., infrastructure) can only take VMware so far. Microsoft is confident that they can methodically chip away at VMware’s market share by tying their applications and management platform to their own Hyper-V-based virtual infrastructure. Richard Jones’ post “Virtualization Wars, what can VMware learn from the past?” talks about this issue in great depth. VMware’s infrastructure focus is its strength, but at the same time its Achilles heel. VMware needs to move up the stack to keep up with Microsoft long term.

I see the move as astute because SpringSource gives VMware the right platform at the right time. Chris Haddad – with our Application and Platform Strategies Service – detailed how a combined VMware and SpringSource platform will impact application development. Virtualization (i.e., server, client, application, storage, I/O, and network) and cloud are fundamentally changing the way that both server and desktop applications are delivered. Last year I wrote about how this transformational period creates opportunity for Microsoft’s competitors such as Apple. Cloud-based application delivery (both internal and external) is equally disruptive to traditional server application delivery models. What this means is that the time to redefine application delivery and to unseat the incumbents is right now.

At Catalyst, Microsoft’s Mark Russinovich talked about how virtualization is changing the way we think about OS and application delivery. Even Microsoft knows that the monolithic OS is not the platform of the future. From a platform developer’s point of view, the hypervisor represents the new hardware. OSs incapable of leveraging the dynamic nature of virtualization simply do not give applications the dynamic capabilities they may need. For example, suppose you want to add more compute resources to a Windows application. For stateless applications, you could deploy them in a network load balanced cluster and scale them out across multiple VMs. For stateful applications, scaling out isn’t as easy (some do this better than others). If you want to hot-add an additional virtual CPU, for example, the guest OS had better be Windows Server 2008 Datacenter edition. No other edition supports CPU hot-add. Clearly, this is an area that Microsoft will address, but it speaks to the problem. The same can be said for hot added memory. If the application requires a restart in order to take advantage of dynamically added memory, such features are of little value. While we’re talking about density and cloud, we also must think about efficiency. When deployed to a single physical box, application processing efficiency may not have meant so much for tier 2 or 3 apps. Put an app on a cloud-based infrastructure that uses consumption-based pricing (thinking future) and it’s another story. The more efficiently that an application and its underlying platform process data, the less expensive it is to run in the cloud.

Finally, I don’t see VMware as grabbing SpringSource to just have the “PaaS checkbox” to line up against Microsoft’s Azure platform. VMware has to think beyond that. Getting a platform for PaaS with a large install base and developer ecosystem gives VMware instant credibility, and broadens the services that can be offered by VMware’s service provider partners. Tomorrow’s dominant cloud providers won’t just have the checkboxes, but they’ll offer innovative, dynamic management, while being highly efficient (again the fewer the CPU cycles, the lower the cost). Microsoft, Citrix, and other competitors in the cloud space also realize that the opportunity exists for new cloud-centric platforms. Having a good core platform is clearly important, but tightly aligning applications and infrastructure to handle the dynamic nature of virtualization and cloud (e.g., dynamic resource add/subtract, distributed data access and potential latency, and security) is new territory. VMware’s core leadership, including Paul Maritz and Todd Nielsen have been there before, dating back to their time at Microsoft. The next steps that VMware takes will likely define how history repeats itself.

History will repeat, but which history will it be – Paul and Todd helping build the market leading software infrastructure? Or Microsoft using tight application, OS, and management integration to thwart competitors?

Cloud Computing Morning Sessions at Catalyst

In cased you missed it, Cloud Computing was a big topic at Catalyst this year. This morning sessions were truly outstanding. Chris Howard kicked it off by discussing the business motivations to externalize IT. One of his main points was that IT tends to make (or build) the things that are "core" to the business and externalize (or expense) those things that are non-essential. This creates a "post-modern" IT model where the strategic is kept internally and uses the cloud to augment less strategic IT services...enabling IT organizations to focus on driving their core business.

After Chris, I presented Burton Group's cloud view -- discussing the value of cloud computing, defining a cloud strategy, cloud definition and tiered architecture model to set the stage for additional presentations today. Burton Group defines cloud as: 

The set of disciplines, technologies, and business models used to render IT capabilities as an on-demand, elastic, scalable service.

The tiered architecture model:

(Actually we declared these several months ago)

Next, Andrew Kaczorec from Eli Lilly gave an excellent presentation about how they leverage EC2 to ramp up compute power for scientific applications, but also how the cloud is a consideration for more enterprise IT applications in the future.

Bill Peer, from International Hotel's Group, spoke on developing your "inner cloud". If you haven't heard Bill speak, you must go! He's so entertaining, you almost forget your learning something. Anyway -- Bill spoke about how IHG is developing an internal cloud using VMware before moving to the external cloud. They have too many concerns over data security, availability, vendor lock-in, and poor SLAs to take the plunge just yet. But -- his point was -- developing an internal cloud is an excellent way to get ready for the internal cloud because it helps the entire organization prepare for service consumption.

Peter Coffee from Salesforce.com did an excellent job discussing PaaS, where Salesforce is headed with Force.com, and the added benefits for using PaaS over IaaS. Peter and I had a good discussion about SLAs (or lack thereof) with Salesforce. His point was that no SLA is going to reimburse the consumer for business lost...only for service outage at best. Also, that SF.com post their uptime record. My point was there are customers who simply won't do business with cloud vendors (or any service vendor) without and SLA. The SLA is not there to protect from business loss, but to serve as a mutual understanding of service quality expectation. That way, when a dispute arises, a third party (legal) can judge if there is a breach of contract. It also gives customers a level of surety that vendors will meet certain service level quality.

Finally, Raghu Raghuram -- GM for VMware's Server Business -- spoke on the Data Center of the Future. Raghu spoke about how the vSphere platform is the new cloud OS and they are enabling vendors and customers alike to build their own clouds.

All in all, it was a great morning. Tons of great customer questions.

BTW -- Burton Group is recording all of these sessions. They will be available very soon.

[posted by: Drue Reeves]