As is fairly obvious, this blog hasn't been updated for a while. The reason is simple. After many happy years involved with virtualisation, I have now moved into a different area. I now manage channel partners at Blue Coat Systems. No, that's nothing to do with Pontins. Our areas of expertise are security and network optimisation, meaning a blog entitled Virtualisation Tribulations now, sadly, has little relevance.
I enjoyed writing the blog, but it did sometimes get me into trouble. I was outspoken and passionate and am certainly not ashamed of anything I wrote (although, admittedly, I do regret the bit where I predicted the early demise of VMware - somewhat embarrassing now they're are a $4bn company!) but I have mellowed with age. Never again do I want to be angrily accused of potentially affecting the stock price of a company for the sake of a premature blog entry. (Although I'm now on very friendly terms with the Director in question!) And my attention span has shortened, 140 characters is about all I can sum up these days.
So why not follow me on Twitter for more attempts at acerbic wit and incisive wisdom - and possibly a little less enthusiasm to bite the hand that feeds me: https://twitter.com/rupertcollier
Thanks for reading.
Rupert
Tuesday, 22 January 2013
Thursday, 1 March 2012
Buttery biscuit base - part I
As published recently (sadly print only, not online) in ComputerScope magazine, Ireland's leading IT magazine. I can only lay official claim to part I, a colleague did part II and I nicked it. But I defy anyone else to get the phrase "buttery biscuit base" into an article on storage virtualisation...
What's stalling virtualisation?
With only around 17-20% of servers worldwide having been virtualised and the hosted desktop model still spluttering into gear, the apparently indisputable benefits of virtualisation don’t appear to be going mainstream. What are the reasons for this and how can we solve them?
Depending on which major market analyst firm you listen to, only around one fifth of servers worldwide have been virtualised with a hypervisor. Whilst other reports do paint rosier pictures, widespread adoption, at least in live environments, would seem to be yet to come. Perhaps this is good news for the virtualisation vendors, or at least their shareholders. However, to view it from a different perspective, if virtualisation is not actually being deployed as extensively as we presumed it would be, are the supposedly undeniable benefits preached by those vendors really as rock solid as they would have you believe?
The honest answer is probably yes. Those organisations which have deployed virtualisation in whatever guise are unlikely to want to go back to the way we used to do things.
Virtualisation has revolutionised organisations’ IT infrastructures in many ways. It has allowed them to re-utilise and get more out of existing hardware and reduce costs in a variety of areas. Perhaps most importantly it has also allowed them to take a much more pro-active approach to end user IT delivery and therefore productivity.
Although not a new technology, VMware and others have successfully re-invented the wheel. VMware sees virtualisation as a three stage process:
Server virtualisation, however, has brought with it some unforeseen sticking points. The proliferation of virtual machines, spun up for certain tasks or test and development activities and not touched again, can have a major impact. It can affect not only the resources of that hardware but also software asset management and security best practices.
So whilst the three stage journey mentioned above is a realistic and achievable aim, there are other challenges that key stakeholders are becoming aware of. Whilst servers are certainly a key lynchpin in a company’s IT world, to not be aware of the impact of server virtualisation on other areas would be to cook your lemon cream cheese cake without its buttery biscuit base. Two of these challenges are often the ultimate, decisive factors in the success or failure of a virtualisation project: management and performance of storage.
Storage and I/O performance are key to the success of any virtualisation project, whether it’s server, application or desktop - particularly the latter. Many applications that, before the advent of virtualisation, enjoyed the luxury of direct attached storage are now having this comfort blanket ripped off them and are being asked to do the same as they always have, if not more, but using shared storage instead.
And many don’t like it. The introduction of just a millisecond of latency is enough to send them into an almighty tailspin. Multi-tenancy also brings about considerable challenges with regard to resilience. One big advantage of single-purpose servers was that, in the event of something going wrong, failures didn’t necessarily have an impact on other resources so the rigidity and continuity of a SAN infrastructure gains huge importance. Add into the mix the demands of cloud-based applications and virtual desktops, and we can begin to pick out the potential Achilles heel in all of this.
One answer to these demands is the concept of a storage hypervisor. A major enabling factor of any virtualisation product is the de-coupling of software from hardware. Ask VMware what vSphere runs on these days and they will probably give you a slightly quizzical look. Essentially, it doesn’t really matter what the badge on the front of the server says, as long as the chipset is virtualisation-aware (and pretty much all are nowadays), they don’t care who made it. You can mix and match your server manufacturers to suit requirements in exactly the same way as Declan Kidney would pick his rugby team.
So should the same not apply to storage? Are the good old days of antiquated single vendor storage silos numbered? Well the trend towards hardware agnosticism is certainly becoming more and more apparent as priorities become performance-based. Just as Kidney would not put Cian Healy at fly half or Tommy Bowe at number eight, so must IT managers be given the flexibility to choose what goes where, not be dictated to by their storage manufacturer.
What's stalling virtualisation?
With only around 17-20% of servers worldwide having been virtualised and the hosted desktop model still spluttering into gear, the apparently indisputable benefits of virtualisation don’t appear to be going mainstream. What are the reasons for this and how can we solve them?
Depending on which major market analyst firm you listen to, only around one fifth of servers worldwide have been virtualised with a hypervisor. Whilst other reports do paint rosier pictures, widespread adoption, at least in live environments, would seem to be yet to come. Perhaps this is good news for the virtualisation vendors, or at least their shareholders. However, to view it from a different perspective, if virtualisation is not actually being deployed as extensively as we presumed it would be, are the supposedly undeniable benefits preached by those vendors really as rock solid as they would have you believe?
The honest answer is probably yes. Those organisations which have deployed virtualisation in whatever guise are unlikely to want to go back to the way we used to do things.
Virtualisation has revolutionised organisations’ IT infrastructures in many ways. It has allowed them to re-utilise and get more out of existing hardware and reduce costs in a variety of areas. Perhaps most importantly it has also allowed them to take a much more pro-active approach to end user IT delivery and therefore productivity.
Although not a new technology, VMware and others have successfully re-invented the wheel. VMware sees virtualisation as a three stage process:
- Bringing production systems onto virtualised servers
- Tackling the priority one applications like Oracle and Exchange
- Delivering an entire IT infrastructure on demand or “as a service”.
Server virtualisation, however, has brought with it some unforeseen sticking points. The proliferation of virtual machines, spun up for certain tasks or test and development activities and not touched again, can have a major impact. It can affect not only the resources of that hardware but also software asset management and security best practices.
So whilst the three stage journey mentioned above is a realistic and achievable aim, there are other challenges that key stakeholders are becoming aware of. Whilst servers are certainly a key lynchpin in a company’s IT world, to not be aware of the impact of server virtualisation on other areas would be to cook your lemon cream cheese cake without its buttery biscuit base. Two of these challenges are often the ultimate, decisive factors in the success or failure of a virtualisation project: management and performance of storage.
Storage and I/O performance are key to the success of any virtualisation project, whether it’s server, application or desktop - particularly the latter. Many applications that, before the advent of virtualisation, enjoyed the luxury of direct attached storage are now having this comfort blanket ripped off them and are being asked to do the same as they always have, if not more, but using shared storage instead.
And many don’t like it. The introduction of just a millisecond of latency is enough to send them into an almighty tailspin. Multi-tenancy also brings about considerable challenges with regard to resilience. One big advantage of single-purpose servers was that, in the event of something going wrong, failures didn’t necessarily have an impact on other resources so the rigidity and continuity of a SAN infrastructure gains huge importance. Add into the mix the demands of cloud-based applications and virtual desktops, and we can begin to pick out the potential Achilles heel in all of this.
One answer to these demands is the concept of a storage hypervisor. A major enabling factor of any virtualisation product is the de-coupling of software from hardware. Ask VMware what vSphere runs on these days and they will probably give you a slightly quizzical look. Essentially, it doesn’t really matter what the badge on the front of the server says, as long as the chipset is virtualisation-aware (and pretty much all are nowadays), they don’t care who made it. You can mix and match your server manufacturers to suit requirements in exactly the same way as Declan Kidney would pick his rugby team.
So should the same not apply to storage? Are the good old days of antiquated single vendor storage silos numbered? Well the trend towards hardware agnosticism is certainly becoming more and more apparent as priorities become performance-based. Just as Kidney would not put Cian Healy at fly half or Tommy Bowe at number eight, so must IT managers be given the flexibility to choose what goes where, not be dictated to by their storage manufacturer.
Buttery biscuit base - part II
One of the magical things about virtualisation is that it’s
really a sort of invisibility cloak. Each virtualisation layer hides the
details of those beneath it. The result is much more efficient access to lower
level resources. Applications don’t need to know about CPU, memory, and other
server details to enjoy access to the resources they need.
Unfortunately, this invisibility tends to get a bit patchy when you move down into the storage infrastructure underneath all those virtualised servers, especially when considering performance management. In theory, storage virtualisation ought to be able to hide the details of the media, protocols and paths involved in managing the performance of a virtualised storage infrastructure. In reality, the machinery still tends to clatter away in plain sight.
The problem is not storage virtualisation per se, which can boost storage performance in a number of ways. The problem is a balkanised storage infrastructure, where virtualisation is supplied by hardware controllers associated with each “chunk” of storage (e.g. an array). This means that the top storage virtualisation layer is human: the hard-pressed IT personnel who have to make it all work together.
Many IT departments accept the devil’s bargain of vendor lock-in to try to avoid this. However, even if you do commit your storage fortunes to a single vendor, the pace of innovation guarantees the presence of end-of-life devices that don’t support the latest performance management features. Also, the expense of this approach puts it beyond the reach of most companies, who can’t afford a forklift upgrade to a single-vendor storage infrastructure. They have to deal with the real-world mix of storage devices that result from keeping up with innovation and competitive pressures.
It’s for these reasons, we are seeing many companies turning to storage hypervisors, which, like server hypervisors, are not tied to a particular vendor’s hardware. A storage hypervisor throws the invisibility cloak over the details of all of your storage assets, from the latest high-performance SAN to SATA disks that have been orphaned by the consolidation of a virtualisation initiative. Instead of trying to match a bunch of disparate storage devices to the needs of different applications, you can combine devices with similar performance into easily provisioned and managed virtual storage pools that hide all the unnecessary details. And, since you’re not tied to a single vendor, you can look for the best deals in storage, and keep using old storage longer.
As touched on earlier, storage performance is often the single most critical aspect of any virtualisation project. Or, to turn that on its head, it’s often the reason that rollout pilots fail. Desktop virtualisation is a very particular case in point. The sheer amount (and therefore expense) of storage hardware required to service a truly hosted desktop model, where users can access their complete desktop from any internet-enabled device, can be vast just for a stateful model. Should the requirement be for stateless desktops, where a complete virtual desktop is assembled on demand, the difficulties intensify yet further. Then consider what happens if everyone wants this at the same time. Boot-storming is the bane of every desktop virtualisation vendor’s life. Server virtualisation is, admittedly, not quite as dramatic but right-sizing and adequate performance of storage resources is still a must.
Storage hypervisors provide performance boosts in three main ways:
Unfortunately, this invisibility tends to get a bit patchy when you move down into the storage infrastructure underneath all those virtualised servers, especially when considering performance management. In theory, storage virtualisation ought to be able to hide the details of the media, protocols and paths involved in managing the performance of a virtualised storage infrastructure. In reality, the machinery still tends to clatter away in plain sight.
The problem is not storage virtualisation per se, which can boost storage performance in a number of ways. The problem is a balkanised storage infrastructure, where virtualisation is supplied by hardware controllers associated with each “chunk” of storage (e.g. an array). This means that the top storage virtualisation layer is human: the hard-pressed IT personnel who have to make it all work together.
Many IT departments accept the devil’s bargain of vendor lock-in to try to avoid this. However, even if you do commit your storage fortunes to a single vendor, the pace of innovation guarantees the presence of end-of-life devices that don’t support the latest performance management features. Also, the expense of this approach puts it beyond the reach of most companies, who can’t afford a forklift upgrade to a single-vendor storage infrastructure. They have to deal with the real-world mix of storage devices that result from keeping up with innovation and competitive pressures.
It’s for these reasons, we are seeing many companies turning to storage hypervisors, which, like server hypervisors, are not tied to a particular vendor’s hardware. A storage hypervisor throws the invisibility cloak over the details of all of your storage assets, from the latest high-performance SAN to SATA disks that have been orphaned by the consolidation of a virtualisation initiative. Instead of trying to match a bunch of disparate storage devices to the needs of different applications, you can combine devices with similar performance into easily provisioned and managed virtual storage pools that hide all the unnecessary details. And, since you’re not tied to a single vendor, you can look for the best deals in storage, and keep using old storage longer.
As touched on earlier, storage performance is often the single most critical aspect of any virtualisation project. Or, to turn that on its head, it’s often the reason that rollout pilots fail. Desktop virtualisation is a very particular case in point. The sheer amount (and therefore expense) of storage hardware required to service a truly hosted desktop model, where users can access their complete desktop from any internet-enabled device, can be vast just for a stateful model. Should the requirement be for stateless desktops, where a complete virtual desktop is assembled on demand, the difficulties intensify yet further. Then consider what happens if everyone wants this at the same time. Boot-storming is the bane of every desktop virtualisation vendor’s life. Server virtualisation is, admittedly, not quite as dramatic but right-sizing and adequate performance of storage resources is still a must.
Storage hypervisors provide performance boosts in three main ways:
- Caching
- Automated tiering
- Path
management.
Within a true
software-only storage hypervisor, the RAM on the server that hosts it is used
as a cache for all the storage assets it virtualises. Advanced write-coalescing
and read pre-fetching algorithms deliver significantly faster I/O response.
Cache can also be used to compensate for the widely different traffic levels
and peak loads found in virtualised server environments. It smooths out traffic
surges and balances workloads more intelligently so that applications and users
can work more efficiently. In general, performance of the underlying storage is
easily doubled using a storage hypervisor.
Tiering.
Tiering.
You can also improve performance by
tiering the data. All your storage assets are managed as a common pool of
storage and continually monitored as to their performance. The auto-tiering
technology migrates the most frequently-used data—which generally needs higher
performance—onto the fastest devices. Likewise, less frequently-used data
typically gets demoted to higher capacity but lower-performance devices.
Auto-tiering uses tiering profiles that dictate both the initial allocation and
subsequent migration dynamics. A user can go with the standard set of default
profiles or can create custom profiles for specific application access
patterns. However you do it, you get the performance and capacity utilisation
benefits of tiering from all your devices, regardless of manufacturer.
As new generations of devices appear such as Solid State Disks (SSD), Flash
memories and very large capacity disks; these faster or larger capacity devices
can simply be added to the available pool of storage devices and assigned a
tier. In addition, as devices age, they can be reset to a lower tier often
extending their useful life. Many users are interested in deploying SSD
technology to gain performance. However, due to the high-cost and their limited
write traffic life-cycles there is a clear need for auto-tiering and caching
architectures to maximise their efficiency. A storage hypervisor can absorb a
good deal of the write traffic thereby extending the useful life of SSDs and,
with auto-tiering, only that data that needs the benefits of the high-speed SSD
tier are directed there. With the storage hypervisor in place, the system
self-tunes and optimises the use of all the storage devices.
Path management.
Path management.
Finally, a storage
hypervisor can greatly reduce the complexity of path management. The software
auto-discovers the connections between storage devices and the server(s) it’s
running on. It then monitors queue depth to detect congestion and route I/O in
a balanced way across all possible routes to the storage in a given virtual
pool. With so much reporting and monitoring data available, this allows
administrators to get a level of performance across disparate devices from
different vendors.
To conclude, virtualisation is not a silver bullet, but, to
be fair, it was rarely touted as such either. The negative side-effects can
often be mitigated, it just depends on how you approach the main one, which is
storage. Do you continue to go along with the hardware manufacturers’ 3-year
life cycle approach, buying overpriced hardware that is deliberately not
designed to work alongside anyone else’s kit or do you take the view that disk
is just disk after all, regardless of who made it? The real value is in the
software that manages it and this management can be provided by a storage hypervisor.
With the cost of hard drives increasing rapidly due to the floods in Thailand
in 2011, never has it been more important to give yourself choice.
Thursday, 15 December 2011
DataCore Customer Conference 2012
If you are a DataCore distributor, channel partner or end user - or even none of the above but would like to take a closer look at what we do - you are cordially invited to our annual Customer Conference on 2nd February in London. Several of our most senior VPs will be in attendance and it promises to be a hugely rewarding day. We would love to see you there - please let me know if you intend to come.
Date: Thursday 2nd February, 2012
Venue: Andaz Hotel, right beside Liverpool Street station, London
Registration: http://tinyurl.com/dxedtgr
Agenda:
Date: Thursday 2nd February, 2012
Venue: Andaz Hotel, right beside Liverpool Street station, London
Registration: http://tinyurl.com/dxedtgr
Agenda:
08.00
- Registration opens.
09.30 - Keynote 1 – Analyst perspective
on the state of the industry.
10.15 - Keynote 2 – DataCore CTO's update on our vision of the industry.
11.15 - A year in the life of DataCore - CEO George Teixeira on 2011.
11.45 - Technical Roadmap – DataCore Chief Engineer's outline on what’s coming.
12.15 - Working alliances – News/updates from selected alliance partners.
10.15 - Keynote 2 – DataCore CTO's update on our vision of the industry.
11.15 - A year in the life of DataCore - CEO George Teixeira on 2011.
11.45 - Technical Roadmap – DataCore Chief Engineer's outline on what’s coming.
12.15 - Working alliances – News/updates from selected alliance partners.
14.00 - Technical track (End users
and Channel partners). "How to..." sessions:
How to: Hot upgrade from SAN Melody and SAN Symphony to SAN Symphony-V.
How to: Understand and make use of storage allocation units in SAN Symphony-V.
How to: Use Powershell basics / host integration kits.
How to: Avoid the Top 10 support gotchas.
How to: Understand and make use of storage allocation units in SAN Symphony-V.
How to: Use Powershell basics / host integration kits.
How to: Avoid the Top 10 support gotchas.
14:00 - Sales track (Channel
Partners only). "Learn more..." sessions.
Learn more: Taking the market on and winning.
Learn more: Product positioning and sales strategies.
Learn more: Lead management and working with DataCore.
Learn more: Product positioning and sales strategies.
Learn more: Lead management and working with DataCore.
16.30 - Key strategic partnerships –
who we like to work with and why.
17.00 - Customer case study.
17.30 - Panel and wrap-up.
17.00 - Customer case study.
17.30 - Panel and wrap-up.
18.00 - Drinks reception
commences in Masonic Temple (no secret handshake required)
18.30 - Keynote 3: Futurologist David Smith and his crystal ball.
21.00 (ish...) Close
18.30 - Keynote 3: Futurologist David Smith and his crystal ball.
21.00 (ish...) Close
Registration: http://tinyurl.com/dxedtgr
Wednesday, 14 December 2011
HDD = heavy discounts disappearing
Whilst I, as a DataCore employee, certainly don't want to be seen to be taking advantage of other people's misfortune, the facts are that there is a shortage of hard disk supply at the moment due to recent flooding in Thailand. As has been widely reported, Western Digital, Toshiba, Intel and others have been directly affected and, with the current situation being as it is, the usual rules of supply and demand are taking over, i.e. costs of hard drives are going up. This is of course perfectly normal, just ask the hoteliers in Newmarket when there's a big weekend of horse-racing. Room prices double at least. And, just as punters need to be flexible as to where they stay to avoid being fleeced during Guineas weekend, IT consumers also need to find ways around paying through the nose for what are normally very inexpensive hard disks.
A storage hypervisor can provide the answer.
Firstly, what is a storage hypervisor? Well, it's a software layer that sits directly above the storage hardware and, amongst other things, turns whatever type of disk it finds beneath it - be it direct-attached, fibre-attached, iSCSI-attached, SAS, SATA, SSD, Flash, old, middle-aged, new, made by, sorry bought from HP, bought from IBM, bought from EMC, bought from HDS, bought from whomever - into one completely anonymous pool of resource for the application servers that need it. This of course isn't the official DataCore company description and there is a lot more that a hypervisor does than just unify heterogeneous storage resources, but, for the purposes of this blog entry, I think you get the point.
So how does this help avoid HDD price hikes? There are three main benefits (plus one handy side-effect):
1) Open up the whole HDD supplier market. With a virtualised storage infrastructure, you can buy whatever disk you like - from whomever you like. No longer are you tied in to one manufacturer; DataCore just sees a disk, not the vendor badge on the front. Independence = flexibility = choice = lower cost.
2) Consider SSD. Solid state disks are not as badly affected in terms of supply as "spinning rust" as I've heard HDD described. With previously inexpensive hard drives becoming expensive, the gulf in cost to SSD is rapidly decreasing. So why not try out some solid state memory and use DataCore's auto-tiering functionality to ensure it is not clogged up with "dead" data but hosts just the data your users are accessing most frequently.
3) Sweat the assets. Enabling customers to re-purpose existing or aging kit is one of the main reasons DataCore has done so well, particularly in sensitive financial times. Disk doesn't suddenly stop spinning after 3 years, despite what the tier 1 storage vendors may have you believe when they present you with the support quote for year 4. With a bit of thought, planning and the use of technologies like thin provisioning, existing storage or even server hardware can be re-purposed within your environment and you may not actually need to buy new disk.
And finally, the handy side-effect I mentioned is looking to the CLOUD. The current swear word in the IT industry. It means everything to some, nothing to others. In this scenario, I purely mean off-site storage resource that you can avail of, possibly temporarily, located in a huge data-centre that doesn't belong to you and you'll probably never see. I'll leave the whole security and data retrieval thing to someone else but the fact is, there are plenty of companies out there who will sell you a virtual hotel that your data can live in for a while, or even for ever, perfectly happily, perfectly comfortably and perfectly securely.
How to get it there? Storage virtualisation makes data mobile, dynamic and flexible. With DataCore (and TwinStrata, our cloud gateway partner), you can auto-tier workloads off to your chosen cloud or IAAS ("Infrastructure as a Service") provider at the click of a button. I'll cover this in more detail another time.
So you see, you don't necessarily have to wait another 6-12 months for prices to come back down again, you just have to re-think the way you view (and buy) your disk. We're all doing it with VMware on servers, what makes you think you can't do the very same thing with storage?
A storage hypervisor can provide the answer.
Firstly, what is a storage hypervisor? Well, it's a software layer that sits directly above the storage hardware and, amongst other things, turns whatever type of disk it finds beneath it - be it direct-attached, fibre-attached, iSCSI-attached, SAS, SATA, SSD, Flash, old, middle-aged, new, made by, sorry bought from HP, bought from IBM, bought from EMC, bought from HDS, bought from whomever - into one completely anonymous pool of resource for the application servers that need it. This of course isn't the official DataCore company description and there is a lot more that a hypervisor does than just unify heterogeneous storage resources, but, for the purposes of this blog entry, I think you get the point.
So how does this help avoid HDD price hikes? There are three main benefits (plus one handy side-effect):
1) Open up the whole HDD supplier market. With a virtualised storage infrastructure, you can buy whatever disk you like - from whomever you like. No longer are you tied in to one manufacturer; DataCore just sees a disk, not the vendor badge on the front. Independence = flexibility = choice = lower cost.
2) Consider SSD. Solid state disks are not as badly affected in terms of supply as "spinning rust" as I've heard HDD described. With previously inexpensive hard drives becoming expensive, the gulf in cost to SSD is rapidly decreasing. So why not try out some solid state memory and use DataCore's auto-tiering functionality to ensure it is not clogged up with "dead" data but hosts just the data your users are accessing most frequently.
3) Sweat the assets. Enabling customers to re-purpose existing or aging kit is one of the main reasons DataCore has done so well, particularly in sensitive financial times. Disk doesn't suddenly stop spinning after 3 years, despite what the tier 1 storage vendors may have you believe when they present you with the support quote for year 4. With a bit of thought, planning and the use of technologies like thin provisioning, existing storage or even server hardware can be re-purposed within your environment and you may not actually need to buy new disk.
And finally, the handy side-effect I mentioned is looking to the CLOUD. The current swear word in the IT industry. It means everything to some, nothing to others. In this scenario, I purely mean off-site storage resource that you can avail of, possibly temporarily, located in a huge data-centre that doesn't belong to you and you'll probably never see. I'll leave the whole security and data retrieval thing to someone else but the fact is, there are plenty of companies out there who will sell you a virtual hotel that your data can live in for a while, or even for ever, perfectly happily, perfectly comfortably and perfectly securely.
How to get it there? Storage virtualisation makes data mobile, dynamic and flexible. With DataCore (and TwinStrata, our cloud gateway partner), you can auto-tier workloads off to your chosen cloud or IAAS ("Infrastructure as a Service") provider at the click of a button. I'll cover this in more detail another time.
So you see, you don't necessarily have to wait another 6-12 months for prices to come back down again, you just have to re-think the way you view (and buy) your disk. We're all doing it with VMware on servers, what makes you think you can't do the very same thing with storage?
Tuesday, 9 August 2011
Please release me, let me go...
After the announcement last week that the Govt are spending over the odds on IT due to what was termed an "oligopoly" of vendors and suppliers, infrastructure decision-makers may now feel obliged to look at their options. On the topic of hardware which, in many cases, is one of the most expensive parts of any project, virtualisation technologies have enabled choice. But not, it would seem, in the storage industry.
Storage seems to be one of the last remaining bastions of quasi-compulsory vendor lock-in – something that is no longer the case with desktops or servers. If we take desktop virtualisation as an example, the main proponents provide the opportunity to access a hosted desktop with whatever device you like, whether that be a desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone or whatever. In fact diversity is positively welcomed with Citrix being amongst the leaders in the “BYOD” (Bring Your Own Device) initiative and the embracing of what is often described as the consumerisation of IT.
Equally VMware revolutionised the server hardware industry and enabled customers to rationalise their antiquated server purchasing routines, which generally consisted of buying new boxes very cheaply and very often. This was neither green nor cost-efficient and the success of the hypervisor has provided choice of both manufacturer and technology. The old 3-year hardware lifecycle, in this economic climate, has all but disappeared in some verticals and IT admins are being increasingly forced to “sweat their assets” for longer. This is now possible because the hypervisor takes care of software advances during that time.
Storage appears to be different. Companies still seem to grudgingly accept they are locked in to one vendor, regardless of whether that vendor is right for them, both in terms of their products as well as their price. Need a second site for DR? Great – but you’ll pretty much need to buy the same, often very expensive, manufacturer as your primary site, despite the fact your DR site may never even be used! Had enough of vendor A and want to migrate to vendor B? Good luck!
DataCore is the “Switzerland” of storage if you will. We act as a hypervisor for the storage infrastructure, giving customers the choice, both of vendor and of technology. We can often provide zero-day ROI just on hardware savings alone, let alone all the soft cost-savings and increased performance and manageability we offer. When customers have a choice, they can buy what’s right for them, when it is right for them to do so. It also then gives them the option to take ruthless advantage of end of quarter deals throughout the year from whichever hardware vendor or distributor happens to be slightly shy of target.
Cisco recently announced what they see as the top 10 technology trends and number 2 on the list was the unstoppable tsunami of data. Apparently, we're creating a zettabyte of data globally every year and this will only accelerate. All this data needs to be stored and managed so surely performance and enablement of disk choice must be top of the list of critical factors? Not all of that data is needed all of the time but frequently accessed information requires fast disk. Fast disk is not cheap. Added to that, legislation and insurance companies are now demanding secure data archival with realistic accessibility timeframes (i.e. not tape).
With such disparity in data requirements, customers need flexibility to ascertain what’s right for them. There are plenty of smaller storage hardware companies out there that have fantastic solutions at a fraction of the cost of premium label kit. Surely this is therefore now the time for customers to embrace storage virtualisation as they did with server and are now doing with desktop and finally realise some of the cost-savings that can be achieved by avoiding vendor lock-in?
This piece formed the basis of an interview with CRN in the UK, the result of which you can read here.
And, for those of who still remember the title of this post and are partial to some cracking 80's mullets and moustaches, here's Engelbert for you. Nice.
Storage seems to be one of the last remaining bastions of quasi-compulsory vendor lock-in – something that is no longer the case with desktops or servers. If we take desktop virtualisation as an example, the main proponents provide the opportunity to access a hosted desktop with whatever device you like, whether that be a desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone or whatever. In fact diversity is positively welcomed with Citrix being amongst the leaders in the “BYOD” (Bring Your Own Device) initiative and the embracing of what is often described as the consumerisation of IT.
Equally VMware revolutionised the server hardware industry and enabled customers to rationalise their antiquated server purchasing routines, which generally consisted of buying new boxes very cheaply and very often. This was neither green nor cost-efficient and the success of the hypervisor has provided choice of both manufacturer and technology. The old 3-year hardware lifecycle, in this economic climate, has all but disappeared in some verticals and IT admins are being increasingly forced to “sweat their assets” for longer. This is now possible because the hypervisor takes care of software advances during that time.
Storage appears to be different. Companies still seem to grudgingly accept they are locked in to one vendor, regardless of whether that vendor is right for them, both in terms of their products as well as their price. Need a second site for DR? Great – but you’ll pretty much need to buy the same, often very expensive, manufacturer as your primary site, despite the fact your DR site may never even be used! Had enough of vendor A and want to migrate to vendor B? Good luck!
DataCore is the “Switzerland” of storage if you will. We act as a hypervisor for the storage infrastructure, giving customers the choice, both of vendor and of technology. We can often provide zero-day ROI just on hardware savings alone, let alone all the soft cost-savings and increased performance and manageability we offer. When customers have a choice, they can buy what’s right for them, when it is right for them to do so. It also then gives them the option to take ruthless advantage of end of quarter deals throughout the year from whichever hardware vendor or distributor happens to be slightly shy of target.
Cisco recently announced what they see as the top 10 technology trends and number 2 on the list was the unstoppable tsunami of data. Apparently, we're creating a zettabyte of data globally every year and this will only accelerate. All this data needs to be stored and managed so surely performance and enablement of disk choice must be top of the list of critical factors? Not all of that data is needed all of the time but frequently accessed information requires fast disk. Fast disk is not cheap. Added to that, legislation and insurance companies are now demanding secure data archival with realistic accessibility timeframes (i.e. not tape).
With such disparity in data requirements, customers need flexibility to ascertain what’s right for them. There are plenty of smaller storage hardware companies out there that have fantastic solutions at a fraction of the cost of premium label kit. Surely this is therefore now the time for customers to embrace storage virtualisation as they did with server and are now doing with desktop and finally realise some of the cost-savings that can be achieved by avoiding vendor lock-in?
This piece formed the basis of an interview with CRN in the UK, the result of which you can read here.
And, for those of who still remember the title of this post and are partial to some cracking 80's mullets and moustaches, here's Engelbert for you. Nice.
I'm back...
I know, I know, it's been a while - almost a year in fact - since I last posted any thoughts on here. I never went away but a few things have certainly changed and, for a while, I had neither the time nor the inclination to continue writing this blog if I'm honest. All that is different now though, I have a new motivation and energy - a change is as good as a rest, as they say - and a new area of IT to get my teeth into.
In March, I moved on from my role at COMPUTERLINKS, where I was looking after the Citrix franchise for 5 years and, latterly, getting a newly-formed virtualisation division on its feet. COMPUTERLINKS and Citrix parted company at the end of 2010 and, for the few of you who have followed this blog since its inception (for which I am extremely grateful!), you may expect me, at this point, to go into great detail on my thoughts around that decision. I have though, for better or worse, changed my attitude slightly since then. The controversy that I have unleashed in the past (which occasionally got me into scrapes with various figures of authority!) is now all but gone. As a result, whilst continuing to try and air my views honestly and openly, I will refrain from making comments that might get me into trouble! Maybe I have just grown up and the angry little man has disappeared...
My new working life is quite different. I am now in the promised land of "vendor-dom". I work for DataCore Software - still virtualisation (so I can retain the title of this blog for now), just this time it's storage, rather than servers and desktops. Life as a vendor is very different from distribution. You feel you have a lot more control over your own destiny, rather than continually being crunched from both sides - the resellers and the vendors. Having said that, distribution gave me an invaluable grounding in what the channel needs and, more importantly, doesn't need and I hope I can bring some of my experience to bear now.
DataCore makes fantastic technology, the equal of which is pretty much non-existent. We are a hypervisor-type layer that sits above an organisation's storage infrastructure and virtualises their disk arrays, regardless of what type of disk it is and which hardware manufacturer made it. More on our company and technology in later blogs.
Anyway, I'll make some sort of attempt to keep this as up to date as I can. News comes thick and fast in the IT industry and Twitter just doesn't cut it sometimes. I would love to read the odd reaction from time to time too, so please do comment.
In March, I moved on from my role at COMPUTERLINKS, where I was looking after the Citrix franchise for 5 years and, latterly, getting a newly-formed virtualisation division on its feet. COMPUTERLINKS and Citrix parted company at the end of 2010 and, for the few of you who have followed this blog since its inception (for which I am extremely grateful!), you may expect me, at this point, to go into great detail on my thoughts around that decision. I have though, for better or worse, changed my attitude slightly since then. The controversy that I have unleashed in the past (which occasionally got me into scrapes with various figures of authority!) is now all but gone. As a result, whilst continuing to try and air my views honestly and openly, I will refrain from making comments that might get me into trouble! Maybe I have just grown up and the angry little man has disappeared...
My new working life is quite different. I am now in the promised land of "vendor-dom". I work for DataCore Software - still virtualisation (so I can retain the title of this blog for now), just this time it's storage, rather than servers and desktops. Life as a vendor is very different from distribution. You feel you have a lot more control over your own destiny, rather than continually being crunched from both sides - the resellers and the vendors. Having said that, distribution gave me an invaluable grounding in what the channel needs and, more importantly, doesn't need and I hope I can bring some of my experience to bear now.
DataCore makes fantastic technology, the equal of which is pretty much non-existent. We are a hypervisor-type layer that sits above an organisation's storage infrastructure and virtualises their disk arrays, regardless of what type of disk it is and which hardware manufacturer made it. More on our company and technology in later blogs.
Anyway, I'll make some sort of attempt to keep this as up to date as I can. News comes thick and fast in the IT industry and Twitter just doesn't cut it sometimes. I would love to read the odd reaction from time to time too, so please do comment.
Friday, 24 September 2010
Rumours
I've heard a couple of juicy acquisition rumours are circulating. I may be a bit behind the time actually, Googling them brings up stories from weeks ago. Finger back on pulse from now on...
Firstly, I've heard that VMware may be looking at buying Novell. This I can fully understand, VMware need to work with a full-blown operating system and they'll never be on Microsoft's Christmas card list. Novell also bought PlateSpin a while back so VMware would inherit those VM reconnaissance, right-sizing and management capabilities. I just wonder what they'd be prepared to pay; Novell have refused $1 billion in the past. VMware have loads of cash and I can't see Novell attracting any other serious suitors in the way 3Par did recently so I guess we'll just have to wait and see. Quite honestly, I think VMware would be far better off buying F5 - especially if they are serious about delivering desktops.
The figure of $1 billion pales into insignificance compared to the other rumour I've heard though: EMC being bought by Cisco. Can you imagine it? This would comfortably be the most significant IT acquisition ever, both in terms of value as well as industry fallout. Symantec paid $13 billion for Veritas, HP paid $25 billion for Compaq but, according to V3, this could be the largest ever. Regardless of what the final figure is, it will have to be north of $30 billion anyway - surely?
There are thousands of people better qualified to assess the impact of something like this than I but, in all honesty, I must admit I'd be surprised if it did happen. At least right now anyhow. Not that Cisco couldn't afford it - it has $26 billion in the bank at the moment - I'm just not sure shareholders would approve of such a major play in these times. Yes it would extend their reach further up the stack and the whole EMC/VMW/RSA Security family is a great proposition but banks are still jumpy and debt ain't cheap.
My, my, my - and there was me thinking I was quids in by selling a golf trolley I won in a raffle for 300 quid.
Firstly, I've heard that VMware may be looking at buying Novell. This I can fully understand, VMware need to work with a full-blown operating system and they'll never be on Microsoft's Christmas card list. Novell also bought PlateSpin a while back so VMware would inherit those VM reconnaissance, right-sizing and management capabilities. I just wonder what they'd be prepared to pay; Novell have refused $1 billion in the past. VMware have loads of cash and I can't see Novell attracting any other serious suitors in the way 3Par did recently so I guess we'll just have to wait and see. Quite honestly, I think VMware would be far better off buying F5 - especially if they are serious about delivering desktops.
The figure of $1 billion pales into insignificance compared to the other rumour I've heard though: EMC being bought by Cisco. Can you imagine it? This would comfortably be the most significant IT acquisition ever, both in terms of value as well as industry fallout. Symantec paid $13 billion for Veritas, HP paid $25 billion for Compaq but, according to V3, this could be the largest ever. Regardless of what the final figure is, it will have to be north of $30 billion anyway - surely?
There are thousands of people better qualified to assess the impact of something like this than I but, in all honesty, I must admit I'd be surprised if it did happen. At least right now anyhow. Not that Cisco couldn't afford it - it has $26 billion in the bank at the moment - I'm just not sure shareholders would approve of such a major play in these times. Yes it would extend their reach further up the stack and the whole EMC/VMW/RSA Security family is a great proposition but banks are still jumpy and debt ain't cheap.
My, my, my - and there was me thinking I was quids in by selling a golf trolley I won in a raffle for 300 quid.
Tuesday, 21 September 2010
The new practice laid bare
The new virtualisation practice is now up and running at COMPUTERLINKS and things are moving on incredibly quickly. All the legals are long gone, the official launch PR has been and gone, the vendors are bedding in nicely and getting to know COMPUTERLINKS as a company and we are now concentrating on going to market with their solutions. The most recent development has been the confirmation of two major events and, if you would like to hear more about what we are doing, these would be the best opportunities:
- We will be exhibiting, together with all our new vendors, at IP Expo in Earls Court, London on the 20th / 21st October. You are very welcome to come along, meet the guys and see the technology in action in some cases. You can register for free entry through our dedicated IP Expo portal.
- Alternatively, we are also holding an official launch event for the new virtualisation and cloud computing practices in our London offices on Friday 8th October. More information and registration for this is through the COMPUTERLINKS website.
Wednesday, 15 September 2010
Security in a virtualised world
COMPUTERLINKS, together with several of our vendors, recently sponsored the CRN Golf Day at Foxhills in Surrey. A large part of the sponsorship package was the filming of an expert panel discussing the questions and issues around security in the modern, virtualised data-centre. CRN provided all of the filming and editing and the final version is now ready. CRN are currently showing it on their homepage. Have a look for yourself, it lasts about half an hour:
http://tinyurl.com/2bosx67
The panel is a great line-up. It consists of:
1. My boss, David Ellis, Director of New Technology and Services here at COMPUTERLINKS
2. Caroline Ikomi who is Technical Director at Check Point
3. John Hurley, Senior Technical Consultant at RSA
4. Andy Dancer, CTO at Trend Micro and
5. Nick Hutton, Technical Director at Virtual Machine Company.
Let me know what you think.
http://tinyurl.com/2bosx67
The panel is a great line-up. It consists of:
1. My boss, David Ellis, Director of New Technology and Services here at COMPUTERLINKS
2. Caroline Ikomi who is Technical Director at Check Point
3. John Hurley, Senior Technical Consultant at RSA
4. Andy Dancer, CTO at Trend Micro and
5. Nick Hutton, Technical Director at Virtual Machine Company.
Let me know what you think.
Thursday, 9 September 2010
Dearest trusted one
I've had a few of these emails in the past but none has captured my attention like this one did. Needless to say I made contact immediately and am arranging the transfer of deeds to my house to this poor unfortunate woman as fast as the legal process will allow. Here, verbatim, was the desperate plea for help that so tugged at my heart strings.
Dearest trusted one,
Based on the trust and God's divine guidance that I have this great oppoutunity linking up to you, though we have not meet before but I believe that one have to risk in confiding his secret to succeed sometimes in life. My name is Sussan Bien Salah, 20 years old i am deaf and dum.And i am only daughter of chief/Mrs Ali Salah a major cocoa exporter cum politician.I am native of Lorma in western part of liberia,Africa.I was born out of tragic fate.my mother died from cancer when i was only 4 years old,my father nurtured me with great care and love before he met his own untimely death on the way coming back from business trip from overseas,on his arrival to the airport his driver went to drove him back home on the way they have a fatal car accident which killied his driver at spot while my father spent 3 painful days at hospital before dying.my uncle seized all my father's companies and properties because of our traditionl believe that i'm a woman and deaf and dum.I was left with nothing and dropped out of shool because of finacial difficulties and my uncle's wicked attitude.
my father let me know a deep secret on his sick bed which I want to share with you in a full confidentiality.He deposited a huge sum of (18.5million USD)in one of reputable bank here because of polictical instability in our country Liberia without the knowledge of my uncle.presently i'm in Burkina Faso since the civil war broke out in liberia as a refugee in one of missionary home while my uncle flew to the london with his children.although i have contacted the bank they comfirmed the funds.
Dearest all I want you to do for me is to step forward as my foreign partner to the bank so that the money will be retrieve,I have all the neccesary information to back you up.i will sincerely give you 15% out of the money,5% for any expenses incurred during the transaction and the rest will be used for any investement preferred by you in your country. I am pleading to you with the name of Almighty Allah to help me out of this problem.I am kindly waiting for your soonest response. MAY Allah BLESS YOU.
All my love,
Sussan Bien Salah.
What a heart-wrenching story. The poor woman.
Dearest trusted one,
Based on the trust and God's divine guidance that I have this great oppoutunity linking up to you, though we have not meet before but I believe that one have to risk in confiding his secret to succeed sometimes in life. My name is Sussan Bien Salah, 20 years old i am deaf and dum.And i am only daughter of chief/Mrs Ali Salah a major cocoa exporter cum politician.I am native of Lorma in western part of liberia,Africa.I was born out of tragic fate.my mother died from cancer when i was only 4 years old,my father nurtured me with great care and love before he met his own untimely death on the way coming back from business trip from overseas,on his arrival to the airport his driver went to drove him back home on the way they have a fatal car accident which killied his driver at spot while my father spent 3 painful days at hospital before dying.my uncle seized all my father's companies and properties because of our traditionl believe that i'm a woman and deaf and dum.I was left with nothing and dropped out of shool because of finacial difficulties and my uncle's wicked attitude.
my father let me know a deep secret on his sick bed which I want to share with you in a full confidentiality.He deposited a huge sum of (18.5million USD)in one of reputable bank here because of polictical instability in our country Liberia without the knowledge of my uncle.presently i'm in Burkina Faso since the civil war broke out in liberia as a refugee in one of missionary home while my uncle flew to the london with his children.although i have contacted the bank they comfirmed the funds.
Dearest all I want you to do for me is to step forward as my foreign partner to the bank so that the money will be retrieve,I have all the neccesary information to back you up.i will sincerely give you 15% out of the money,5% for any expenses incurred during the transaction and the rest will be used for any investement preferred by you in your country. I am pleading to you with the name of Almighty Allah to help me out of this problem.I am kindly waiting for your soonest response. MAY Allah BLESS YOU.
All my love,
Sussan Bien Salah.
What a heart-wrenching story. The poor woman.
Tuesday, 31 August 2010
The COMPUTERLINKS Virtualisation Stack
A few months ago, COMPUTERLINKS announced that we were re-structuring our business slightly, to try and take advantage of other growth areas of IT. Many in the market regarded us (and possibly still do) as a niche distributor in the IT security space - although thankfully most also think we are very specialised and deliver considerable value in this area. We want to replicate this good reputation outside of the specialist security market; we've always had several non-security vendors in our portfolio but the accusation could perhaps be levelled at us that we haven't shouted loudly enough about them.
Enter Virtualisation, Cloud Computing and Professional Services. All of them considerable markets already, but with tremendous growth and potential. A colleague and myself were tasked with putting together a selection of vendors, products and technologies that make up an end to end deliverable and taking this to market with the help of several sales specialists and business development staff.
My area of expertise, thanks to 5 years as Citrix Product Manager, was obviously the virtualisation piece and the first steps on this journey are now complete. We announced our suite of "co-brandable" (everything we do is delivered through the channel) virtualisation services a while ago now and we have been selling the Virtual Machine Company dedicated virtualisation appliances for some time too. Throw in the market leader in desktop virtualisation, Citrix, some serious heavy-hitters in the virtualisation security arena and F5's storage management and app delivery capabilities and you could argue we had the basis of a great line-up already.
However, alongside all this is now a round-up of new vendors that really complete the COMPUTERLINKS Virtualisation Stack nicely. The products that will fall under my responsibility are as follows:
Akorri provides virtual infrastructure management software that assures performance and optimises utilisation and operations of server and storage infrastructure.
NetEx is a software-only, virtualisation-ready WAN optimisation solution, ideal for moving large data sets across WANs securely, swiftly and seamlessly.
SteelEye provides business continuity, high availability and disaster recovery solutions for Windows, Linux and virtual platforms.
Virtual Machine Company manufacture dedicated, purpose-built virtualisation hardware appliances, designed specifically for the demanding requirements of virtualised data-centres.
It's a great challenge and I look forward to helping shape the future of COMPUTERLINKS. As always, feedback very welcome.
Click here for the COMPUTERLINKS Virtualisation Stack
Monday, 23 August 2010
All change
Those of you who are subscribed to this blog on RSS would have had pretty continuous radio silence for quite some time. I do apologise but the title of the blog is virtualisation tribulations after all – it would be far too easy if everything ran smoothly, wouldn’t it?
I won’t go into the reasons I suddenly stopped writing in any detail, suffice to say it was decided that there was an inherent conflict of interest. My position as a Product Manager at COMPUTERLINKS often permitted me access to information about products and companies that was not in the public domain. This, on occasion, presented a challenge when writing something that I was trying to make an interesting and thought-provoking (perhaps even controversial…?) read. For these reasons, I decided to stop writing.
However, things have now changed. I am no longer doing the role I was previously, I have now taken on the exciting task, as Virtualisation Product Manager at COMPUTERLINKS, of setting up a virtualisation practice. With that, I wanted to re-start my blog and tackle some of the issues faced by IT administrators and resellers in the virtual world. A lot has happened in the last few months.
I won’t go into the reasons I suddenly stopped writing in any detail, suffice to say it was decided that there was an inherent conflict of interest. My position as a Product Manager at COMPUTERLINKS often permitted me access to information about products and companies that was not in the public domain. This, on occasion, presented a challenge when writing something that I was trying to make an interesting and thought-provoking (perhaps even controversial…?) read. For these reasons, I decided to stop writing.
However, things have now changed. I am no longer doing the role I was previously, I have now taken on the exciting task, as Virtualisation Product Manager at COMPUTERLINKS, of setting up a virtualisation practice. With that, I wanted to re-start my blog and tackle some of the issues faced by IT administrators and resellers in the virtual world. A lot has happened in the last few months.
Tuesday, 7 April 2009
XenServer Administration Poster
Some friends of ours over at 360is have come up with a clever way of displaying their capabilities and services around XenServer: a free administration poster. This rounds up such things as internal networking diagrams, essential commands, guests & templates and hardware essentials in an easy-to-read overview, ready to print out and keep handy in a XenServer-based data-centre. There are 2 versions of the poster, a printer-friendly black & white option or, as Nick describes it, a "printer toner industry stimulus package": the midnight version.
More information here: http://360is.blogspot.com/2009/03/xenserver-administration-poster.html
More information here: http://360is.blogspot.com/2009/03/xenserver-administration-poster.html
Monday, 16 March 2009
Financial Times column piece
I know I've been particularly slack the last few weeks and not updated my blog. There are plenty of things to write about and I will get round to them, but there simply aren't enough hours in the day at the moment.
In the meantime, I'm very proud to be able to say I have been published in the Financial Times' Digital Business section under the Personal View column. For reasons of copyright, I can't re-publish it here but I can link to it so here it is: http://tinyurl.com/a8w34h
In the meantime, I'm very proud to be able to say I have been published in the Financial Times' Digital Business section under the Personal View column. For reasons of copyright, I can't re-publish it here but I can link to it so here it is: http://tinyurl.com/a8w34h
Thursday, 19 February 2009
Citrix XenServer to become free
According to rumours in the press today, XenServer will soon be given away free of charge. As this is very new news, I don't know the ins and outs, I'm sure we will hear more over the coming days, but, if it's true, this would be something of a sensation. We can supposedly expect an announcement on Monday 23rd February.
As I understand it, the XenServer Enterprise product, as it is at the moment, will become free of charge. The only thing that is currently available in the Enterprise Edition that will be removed in the free one is the automated HA functionality. Obviously the extended HA possibilities that the Marathon tie-up enabled will also remain a chargeable option, nor will Provisioning Server (currently available in the Platinum Edition) be included. However XenMotion, XenCentre, Resource Pooling and all the other cool stuff will be in the free edition. Existing users will be able to download a new license file free each year. None of this has officially been confirmed yet I hasten to add.
Apparently, Citrix are aligning themselves with Hyper-V and are bringing out a set of management tools, called Citrix Essentials (not at all confusing, considering Citrix have another product called Access Essentials!) These tools will manage both XenServer and Hyper-V environments and Citrix will charge for these instead of the hypervisor technologies.
My initial thoughts are twofold:
Firstly, this move is perfectly in sync with the original dogma of the Xen project: that hypervisors - and, more broadly, virtualisation - should be free to everyone. Simon Crosby and Prof. Ian Pratt, the two main XenServer gurus at Citrix, have always said that this technology has such profound benefits, it should become a standard as quickly as possible and should, therefore, not be subject to the barrier of a financial outlay. Effective management of these virtual environments, on the other hand, is fair game.
Secondly, VMWare are going to have a field day on this unless Citrix have some very well-prepared arguments. I'm sure they will do, a move like this will cause such a stir, it surely won't have been dreamed up over night, nevertheless I can see lots of headlines to the tune of "XenServer price now reflects real value of product" or "Citrix admits defeat and gives up virtualisation battle" by the VMWare lovers (and/or Citrix haters) out there.
Having said that, perhaps the laughs will also have a touch of nervousness about them too, once this sinks in. VMWare will certainly get a few cheap shots out of this announcement and good luck to them, but, in the long run, where does this actually leave them? Can they really withstand such an aggressive joint attack from Microsoft and Citrix? How long will VMWare be able to continue justifying their extortionate prices? Will Citrix continue to invest in XenServer? How will this announcement affect those users who have already bought XenServer?
Lots of questions. Hopefully we will get some answers over the next few days.
As I understand it, the XenServer Enterprise product, as it is at the moment, will become free of charge. The only thing that is currently available in the Enterprise Edition that will be removed in the free one is the automated HA functionality. Obviously the extended HA possibilities that the Marathon tie-up enabled will also remain a chargeable option, nor will Provisioning Server (currently available in the Platinum Edition) be included. However XenMotion, XenCentre, Resource Pooling and all the other cool stuff will be in the free edition. Existing users will be able to download a new license file free each year. None of this has officially been confirmed yet I hasten to add.
Apparently, Citrix are aligning themselves with Hyper-V and are bringing out a set of management tools, called Citrix Essentials (not at all confusing, considering Citrix have another product called Access Essentials!) These tools will manage both XenServer and Hyper-V environments and Citrix will charge for these instead of the hypervisor technologies.
My initial thoughts are twofold:
Firstly, this move is perfectly in sync with the original dogma of the Xen project: that hypervisors - and, more broadly, virtualisation - should be free to everyone. Simon Crosby and Prof. Ian Pratt, the two main XenServer gurus at Citrix, have always said that this technology has such profound benefits, it should become a standard as quickly as possible and should, therefore, not be subject to the barrier of a financial outlay. Effective management of these virtual environments, on the other hand, is fair game.
Secondly, VMWare are going to have a field day on this unless Citrix have some very well-prepared arguments. I'm sure they will do, a move like this will cause such a stir, it surely won't have been dreamed up over night, nevertheless I can see lots of headlines to the tune of "XenServer price now reflects real value of product" or "Citrix admits defeat and gives up virtualisation battle" by the VMWare lovers (and/or Citrix haters) out there.
Having said that, perhaps the laughs will also have a touch of nervousness about them too, once this sinks in. VMWare will certainly get a few cheap shots out of this announcement and good luck to them, but, in the long run, where does this actually leave them? Can they really withstand such an aggressive joint attack from Microsoft and Citrix? How long will VMWare be able to continue justifying their extortionate prices? Will Citrix continue to invest in XenServer? How will this announcement affect those users who have already bought XenServer?
Lots of questions. Hopefully we will get some answers over the next few days.
Wednesday, 14 January 2009
Clouds on the horizon
With 2009 now well underway (Happy New Year everyone, I hope your festive periods were relaxing, fruitful and merry, although perhaps not in that order), it's time to look ahead and try and get some idea of where the famously speedy - and often shortlived - IT sector trends will take us this year.
Virtualisation, I think we can all agree, took a giant leap forward last year, with general acceptance, at least on a server level, showing signs of ever-increasing maturity. I can't imagine many of the major companies in the UK not now employing VMWare, Citrix, Microsoft or A.N.Other virtualisation vendor somewhere in their estate, whether in live usage or on test networks. The next step is of course ensuring desktop virtualisation catches on as well as server virtualisation has/is and VMWare and Citrix will no doubt continue their dogfight for a while to come. They both appear to be doing very much the same thing now on the VDI front, which is testament to the strength of their technologies on the one hand, but, on the other, has resulted in a straight drag-race to get the missing components of a real, workable virtual desktop infrastructure out there, tested and into production. By that I mean offline VDI, automisation, storage management and the other issues that experts like Brian Madden would like to see solved before VDI can go mainstream. Exciting stuff but I think nirvana is still some way off.
Obviously the economic environment will have an impact on IT spending but I'm so bored with the doom and gloom stories that help make recessions self-fulfilling prophesies that I refuse to take part in it.
Microsoft released their Windows 7 beta and promptly crashed their own download site after reportedly limiting it to 2.5 million copies. For the whole world. They have now taken away the limit so everyone can get it, but only until 24th January. It is significant that it took Microsoft over 5 years (after XP) to take Vista to market yet Windows 7 has a beta release just 13 months after the Vista release date. Despite Microsoft's pathetic protestations of Vista adoption "en masse", I hardly think we need any further proof that Vista was and is a total flop. Windows 7, however, should achieve what most IT vendors were hoping for months ago, namely the opportunity for customers to completely re-evaluate their IT strategy and refresh the whole kaboodle. For Citrix specifically, being such a dominant, infrastructure-level software, this is manna from heaven. The days of clumsy client-server computing might now, finally, be consigned once and for all to the past, with administrators hopefully replacing it with dynamic data-centres, accelerated web apps, virtualised infrastructures and a work-from-anywhere-with-anything-as-long-as-you're-working kind of approach.
Which brings me on to what I see as the most important trend, certainly within our sector of the market: Cloud Computing or Software as a Service (SaaS). Just to clarify for those unfamiliar with the terms: Cloud Computing involves removing the on-site infrastructure and licenses required to run your applications and purchasing a service from a 3rd party instead. None of the apps are then stored locally on your own premises, they are stored "in the cloud" so to speak, i.e. in the Internet, and provided to you according to your requirements, a bit like gas or electricity. Or even your telephone and, as with your phone, you pay a fixed fee per month or per year and are charged separately for overusage if you exceed your agreed limits.
So you take apps away from the desktop, stick them in a back-end datacentre somewhere and allow users to access them in a secure, controlled manner over the web. Haven't we heard this before somewhere? Citrix have been advocating and selling this style of application delivery very successfully for years with XenApp and its predecessors. So is SaaS complementary to Citrix? In my opinion, no. Not in the slightest. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Cloud Computing is as much of a competitor, long-term, to the Citrix/VMWare virtual infrastructure vision as, say, Google Apps presents to Microsoft Office. Ultimately, they will probably co-exist reasonably happily but I suspect battle has already commenced on a small scale.
I just wonder why you would buy into virtual desktops, put together the necessary infrastructure to run them, then have to support and maintain everything ad infinitum, when you can just pay someone else to do it all for you? And you can choke their throat rather than your own if it goes wrong. I may be wrong here but, with the advent of web front ends for most corporate apps, added to the fact that about 90% of new apps are being developed for the web, SaaS appears to me to be a more logical and cost-effective route to go down, especially outside of the large enterprise space.
Where Citrix and VMWare can get involved, and both have thrown their hats into the ring already, is by helping streamline the infrastructure that the SaaS providers need. Citrix have done this with Citrix Cloud Centre, which is basically NetScaler, WANScaler and XenServer cobbled together. But this has nothing to do with the core business of XenApp and, as I see it, neatly sidesteps XenDesktop almost entirely.
Naturally, a lot of companies are jumping on this bandwaggon and a lot has been written about it. I have found several interesting articles such as Jeremy Geelan listing what he sees as the top 50 companies in this space, Stephen Arnold stating who he thinks is leading the wave and The Register with a usage poll. There are, as with everything, plenty of plus and minus points to Cloud Computing and I will discuss these, as well as going into a bit more detail around the threats and opportunities I see for Citrix, in a separate article in the next few days.
Virtualisation, I think we can all agree, took a giant leap forward last year, with general acceptance, at least on a server level, showing signs of ever-increasing maturity. I can't imagine many of the major companies in the UK not now employing VMWare, Citrix, Microsoft or A.N.Other virtualisation vendor somewhere in their estate, whether in live usage or on test networks. The next step is of course ensuring desktop virtualisation catches on as well as server virtualisation has/is and VMWare and Citrix will no doubt continue their dogfight for a while to come. They both appear to be doing very much the same thing now on the VDI front, which is testament to the strength of their technologies on the one hand, but, on the other, has resulted in a straight drag-race to get the missing components of a real, workable virtual desktop infrastructure out there, tested and into production. By that I mean offline VDI, automisation, storage management and the other issues that experts like Brian Madden would like to see solved before VDI can go mainstream. Exciting stuff but I think nirvana is still some way off.
Obviously the economic environment will have an impact on IT spending but I'm so bored with the doom and gloom stories that help make recessions self-fulfilling prophesies that I refuse to take part in it.
Microsoft released their Windows 7 beta and promptly crashed their own download site after reportedly limiting it to 2.5 million copies. For the whole world. They have now taken away the limit so everyone can get it, but only until 24th January. It is significant that it took Microsoft over 5 years (after XP) to take Vista to market yet Windows 7 has a beta release just 13 months after the Vista release date. Despite Microsoft's pathetic protestations of Vista adoption "en masse", I hardly think we need any further proof that Vista was and is a total flop. Windows 7, however, should achieve what most IT vendors were hoping for months ago, namely the opportunity for customers to completely re-evaluate their IT strategy and refresh the whole kaboodle. For Citrix specifically, being such a dominant, infrastructure-level software, this is manna from heaven. The days of clumsy client-server computing might now, finally, be consigned once and for all to the past, with administrators hopefully replacing it with dynamic data-centres, accelerated web apps, virtualised infrastructures and a work-from-anywhere-with-anything-as-long-as-you're-working kind of approach.
Which brings me on to what I see as the most important trend, certainly within our sector of the market: Cloud Computing or Software as a Service (SaaS). Just to clarify for those unfamiliar with the terms: Cloud Computing involves removing the on-site infrastructure and licenses required to run your applications and purchasing a service from a 3rd party instead. None of the apps are then stored locally on your own premises, they are stored "in the cloud" so to speak, i.e. in the Internet, and provided to you according to your requirements, a bit like gas or electricity. Or even your telephone and, as with your phone, you pay a fixed fee per month or per year and are charged separately for overusage if you exceed your agreed limits.
So you take apps away from the desktop, stick them in a back-end datacentre somewhere and allow users to access them in a secure, controlled manner over the web. Haven't we heard this before somewhere? Citrix have been advocating and selling this style of application delivery very successfully for years with XenApp and its predecessors. So is SaaS complementary to Citrix? In my opinion, no. Not in the slightest. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Cloud Computing is as much of a competitor, long-term, to the Citrix/VMWare virtual infrastructure vision as, say, Google Apps presents to Microsoft Office. Ultimately, they will probably co-exist reasonably happily but I suspect battle has already commenced on a small scale.
I just wonder why you would buy into virtual desktops, put together the necessary infrastructure to run them, then have to support and maintain everything ad infinitum, when you can just pay someone else to do it all for you? And you can choke their throat rather than your own if it goes wrong. I may be wrong here but, with the advent of web front ends for most corporate apps, added to the fact that about 90% of new apps are being developed for the web, SaaS appears to me to be a more logical and cost-effective route to go down, especially outside of the large enterprise space.
Where Citrix and VMWare can get involved, and both have thrown their hats into the ring already, is by helping streamline the infrastructure that the SaaS providers need. Citrix have done this with Citrix Cloud Centre, which is basically NetScaler, WANScaler and XenServer cobbled together. But this has nothing to do with the core business of XenApp and, as I see it, neatly sidesteps XenDesktop almost entirely.
Naturally, a lot of companies are jumping on this bandwaggon and a lot has been written about it. I have found several interesting articles such as Jeremy Geelan listing what he sees as the top 50 companies in this space, Stephen Arnold stating who he thinks is leading the wave and The Register with a usage poll. There are, as with everything, plenty of plus and minus points to Cloud Computing and I will discuss these, as well as going into a bit more detail around the threats and opportunities I see for Citrix, in a separate article in the next few days.
Tuesday, 23 December 2008
Signing off
Well that's it folks, I'm on holiday now until 5th January so a last few words to wish you all a very merry Christmas and an even merrier New Year. Or, if you're Chinese, enjoy continuing work as normal until January 26th.
It's been an eventful year, virtualisation has taken a foothold and steadily makes its way towards mass market, only now to be replaced with the next IT buzzwords: Cloud Computing or Software as a Service (SaaS) - more on that in the New Year.
Citrix tricked us all into attending 2 Summits in Orlando, when actually Summit will not now happen in the autumn (which was the reason behind having a second Summit and aligning it properly), it's happening in the spring in Las Vegas. Still, I didn't mind, I got to play 4 new fantastic Florida golf courses.
The usual software product updates showed no sign of slowing down, XenApp 5.0 was probably the most important of these, although XenServer 5.0 was a huge improvement too, and XenDesktop finally hit the market.
The COMPUTERLINKS product portfolio shrunk, then grew, then shrunk a bit and we were ultimately snapped up by Barclays Private Equity. The credit crunch started to nip at our ankles, then steadily worked its way up the leg -and is now well and truly savaging many companies' crown jewels.
Personally, I can look back on a very successul and rewarding 12 months. Work has been good, we have shown considerable growth this year, and I got married in September to the most wonderful person in the world. Still can't get used to wearing this ring though, I've already (almost) lost it several times.
And, last but not least, I am extremely pleased about the birth, and subsequent first unsteady steps, of this blog. In just 7 months, it has gone from zero to... wait for it... over 1,000 visitors! And, for 6 or 7 weeks of that, my Google Analytics counter wasn't working properly, so it's actually probably many more than that. I am truly over the moon that people share an interest in what I write and I look forward to continuing with it next year. Until then, I wish all readers a very enjoyable and relaxing festive period. Be good - and if you can't be good, be good at it.
Rupert
It's been an eventful year, virtualisation has taken a foothold and steadily makes its way towards mass market, only now to be replaced with the next IT buzzwords: Cloud Computing or Software as a Service (SaaS) - more on that in the New Year.
Citrix tricked us all into attending 2 Summits in Orlando, when actually Summit will not now happen in the autumn (which was the reason behind having a second Summit and aligning it properly), it's happening in the spring in Las Vegas. Still, I didn't mind, I got to play 4 new fantastic Florida golf courses.
The usual software product updates showed no sign of slowing down, XenApp 5.0 was probably the most important of these, although XenServer 5.0 was a huge improvement too, and XenDesktop finally hit the market.
The COMPUTERLINKS product portfolio shrunk, then grew, then shrunk a bit and we were ultimately snapped up by Barclays Private Equity. The credit crunch started to nip at our ankles, then steadily worked its way up the leg -and is now well and truly savaging many companies' crown jewels.
Personally, I can look back on a very successul and rewarding 12 months. Work has been good, we have shown considerable growth this year, and I got married in September to the most wonderful person in the world. Still can't get used to wearing this ring though, I've already (almost) lost it several times.
And, last but not least, I am extremely pleased about the birth, and subsequent first unsteady steps, of this blog. In just 7 months, it has gone from zero to... wait for it... over 1,000 visitors! And, for 6 or 7 weeks of that, my Google Analytics counter wasn't working properly, so it's actually probably many more than that. I am truly over the moon that people share an interest in what I write and I look forward to continuing with it next year. Until then, I wish all readers a very enjoyable and relaxing festive period. Be good - and if you can't be good, be good at it.
Rupert
Friday, 12 December 2008
Citrix always gets the blame
I know this is geek humour rather than real humour, but I found an amusing entry this morning on Computerworld blogs, which I hope they don't mind me slightly amending here. Just goes to show why Citrix brought out EdgeSight - Citrix automatically gets the blame for everything!
A user catches their administrator in the hallway and asks her to look at his PC, because Microsoft Outlook takes soooo long to come up when he launches it. "I thought maybe he was referring to a Citrix log-in problem, as my organization works in a Citrix environment," says admin. "I watched him log into Outlook and saw a reminder window pop up."
Then several more reminders appear. And more. And still more.
When the count reaches about 20, the user tells admin that this is going to take a while. Admin offers to clean them out while user goes back to his meeting.
"Apparently he had not been 'dismissing' any of his appointment reminders in quite some time," admin says. "It took over an hour for all the reminders to finally come up. And no wonder - this user had 1,611 of them. I have now shown him how to dismiss an appointment, so hopefully they won't stack up again."
A user catches their administrator in the hallway and asks her to look at his PC, because Microsoft Outlook takes soooo long to come up when he launches it. "I thought maybe he was referring to a Citrix log-in problem, as my organization works in a Citrix environment," says admin. "I watched him log into Outlook and saw a reminder window pop up."
Then several more reminders appear. And more. And still more.
When the count reaches about 20, the user tells admin that this is going to take a while. Admin offers to clean them out while user goes back to his meeting.
"Apparently he had not been 'dismissing' any of his appointment reminders in quite some time," admin says. "It took over an hour for all the reminders to finally come up. And no wonder - this user had 1,611 of them. I have now shown him how to dismiss an appointment, so hopefully they won't stack up again."
Monday, 8 December 2008
Citrix XenServer: Phoenix from the flames?
It's been over a year now since Citrix announced their acquisition of XenSource and eventually re-branded not only the server virtualisation product to XenServer but also their flagship product, Presentation Server, to XenApp. The theory behind this was that the term Xen = virtualisation and the second section of the word simply denoted which kind. XenDesktop followed earlier this year and, not forgetting NetScaler, we had the Citrix Delivery Center (sic).
As an original distributor of XenSource before the acquisition, we have been pushing XenServer for some time now. As such, it has been really disappointing for it not to have taken off in the way we all wanted. This is, of course, music to VMWare's ears and Mike DiPetrillo, a VMWare employee and prolific blogger, took a swipe at it a few weeks ago. Furthermore, one of the analysts I speak to quite regularly ceased regarding XenServer as a viable competitor in the server virtualisation space quite some time ago. All in all, not great news, particularly when you recall the extent of Citrix's investment. 500 million dollars was looking like a snip when you considered how heavily the announcement rained on VMWare's IPO parade, but, at that stage, the sales were expected to back up that PR coup much more effectively than they have. Even Roger Baskerville has jumped ship and I've met few people more enthusiastic about XenServer as he was (with the notable exception of Simon Crosby of course).
All of this puts me in a slightly difficult position. Regular readers might expect me to try and vindicate the XenServer-naysayers; they would no doubt also expect me to pour considerable scorn over Citrix's continued claims that it is gaining in market share and they would surely expect me to join the growing ranks of doubters about its future. In actual fact, a part of me wants to because it would be both easy and fun, but, after careful consideration, I won't do anything of the sort. And here's why.
Citrix XenServer is only now, with the recent version 5.0 release, capable of going toe-to-toe with VMWare and not coming away with much more than perhaps a bit of a fat lip. Unfortunately for Citrix, all the hype around XenServer was at a time when the product was, shall we say, in the "catching-up phase" and VMWare didn't have many problems defending its territory. Nowadays, it is a much more able competitor, as recent high-profile wins at Tesco and SAP have gone some way to proving. Customers will see a completely different product in proof of concepts now - one that has undergone 3 major releases in a year and is now true enterprise class.
Secondly, there is still a massive market out there for virtualisation. Virtually (pun fully intended) every presentation I've seen in the past couple of years has included a slide saying only 8%/10%/12% of servers are currently virtualised. Talking to one of my contacts at Citrix recently, he highlighted an article that the magazine The Economist had recently published stating that data centres account for 1.5% of America's carbon emissions - and this figure is growing each year. Bearing in mind the airline industry accounts for 1.8% (and think how much criticism they come under), should we not be thinking about ways to reduce this before the tree-huggers realise and start torching our X5s?
If you put XenApp on XenServer, Citrix tell us you can get 73% more users on a box. If someone brought out a product that reduced the airline industry's carbon emissions by 73%, they'd be a very rich person indeed. That last statement is deliberately obtuse and wildly inaccurate by the way, but you get the point - recession or no recession, there is a lot of cash out there and, regardless of VMWare's revenues, Citrix XenServer is still ideally positioned to be successful because it solves a major problem. I listened to an excellent soothsayer at the COMPUTERLINKS University recently. Do you know what people will spend most of their IT budgets on in the next few years? Correct. Virtualisation.
Thirdly, I just get the feeling there is too much going on for it not to be a success in the end. Citrix have signed OEM agreements with Dell, HP, NEC and one or two others, they have teamed up with Marathon to offer industry-leading high availability and NetApp and Dell EqualLogic on the storage side, they seem to be able to develop at about twice the speed of others, you can interchange XenServer VMs with Microsoft VMs as and when you like, they have a great industry spokesman in Simon Crosby, the market is going the way they want and, perhaps most significantly, COMPUTERLINKS is no longer the leading disti in the UK. I say this with a tinge of irony because of course it's been great being top disti for XenServer most of the year but, having now been overtaken, it's a sign that the big boys in the Citrix channel are starting to take it on, not just the specialists that have been selling it up to now.
Don't get me wrong, VMWare will remain the top dog for a long time to come but don't write off Citrix XenServer just yet. If nothing else, it gives customers a real choice for a change.
As an original distributor of XenSource before the acquisition, we have been pushing XenServer for some time now. As such, it has been really disappointing for it not to have taken off in the way we all wanted. This is, of course, music to VMWare's ears and Mike DiPetrillo, a VMWare employee and prolific blogger, took a swipe at it a few weeks ago. Furthermore, one of the analysts I speak to quite regularly ceased regarding XenServer as a viable competitor in the server virtualisation space quite some time ago. All in all, not great news, particularly when you recall the extent of Citrix's investment. 500 million dollars was looking like a snip when you considered how heavily the announcement rained on VMWare's IPO parade, but, at that stage, the sales were expected to back up that PR coup much more effectively than they have. Even Roger Baskerville has jumped ship and I've met few people more enthusiastic about XenServer as he was (with the notable exception of Simon Crosby of course).
All of this puts me in a slightly difficult position. Regular readers might expect me to try and vindicate the XenServer-naysayers; they would no doubt also expect me to pour considerable scorn over Citrix's continued claims that it is gaining in market share and they would surely expect me to join the growing ranks of doubters about its future. In actual fact, a part of me wants to because it would be both easy and fun, but, after careful consideration, I won't do anything of the sort. And here's why.
Citrix XenServer is only now, with the recent version 5.0 release, capable of going toe-to-toe with VMWare and not coming away with much more than perhaps a bit of a fat lip. Unfortunately for Citrix, all the hype around XenServer was at a time when the product was, shall we say, in the "catching-up phase" and VMWare didn't have many problems defending its territory. Nowadays, it is a much more able competitor, as recent high-profile wins at Tesco and SAP have gone some way to proving. Customers will see a completely different product in proof of concepts now - one that has undergone 3 major releases in a year and is now true enterprise class.
Secondly, there is still a massive market out there for virtualisation. Virtually (pun fully intended) every presentation I've seen in the past couple of years has included a slide saying only 8%/10%/12% of servers are currently virtualised. Talking to one of my contacts at Citrix recently, he highlighted an article that the magazine The Economist had recently published stating that data centres account for 1.5% of America's carbon emissions - and this figure is growing each year. Bearing in mind the airline industry accounts for 1.8% (and think how much criticism they come under), should we not be thinking about ways to reduce this before the tree-huggers realise and start torching our X5s?
If you put XenApp on XenServer, Citrix tell us you can get 73% more users on a box. If someone brought out a product that reduced the airline industry's carbon emissions by 73%, they'd be a very rich person indeed. That last statement is deliberately obtuse and wildly inaccurate by the way, but you get the point - recession or no recession, there is a lot of cash out there and, regardless of VMWare's revenues, Citrix XenServer is still ideally positioned to be successful because it solves a major problem. I listened to an excellent soothsayer at the COMPUTERLINKS University recently. Do you know what people will spend most of their IT budgets on in the next few years? Correct. Virtualisation.
Thirdly, I just get the feeling there is too much going on for it not to be a success in the end. Citrix have signed OEM agreements with Dell, HP, NEC and one or two others, they have teamed up with Marathon to offer industry-leading high availability and NetApp and Dell EqualLogic on the storage side, they seem to be able to develop at about twice the speed of others, you can interchange XenServer VMs with Microsoft VMs as and when you like, they have a great industry spokesman in Simon Crosby, the market is going the way they want and, perhaps most significantly, COMPUTERLINKS is no longer the leading disti in the UK. I say this with a tinge of irony because of course it's been great being top disti for XenServer most of the year but, having now been overtaken, it's a sign that the big boys in the Citrix channel are starting to take it on, not just the specialists that have been selling it up to now.
Don't get me wrong, VMWare will remain the top dog for a long time to come but don't write off Citrix XenServer just yet. If nothing else, it gives customers a real choice for a change.
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