When Virtualization will mean "Management"

It's been awhile since I last blogged.  Have been busy at a new job, where I'm handling the marketing launch of our new integrated storage management product.  Surprisingly, though, it was my team leader who insisted that blogging needs to be something where you, "see an article and you write about it then".  So I'm following that advice.

I just read a CNET story, "Enterprise storage gets interesting again", which quoted a VM storage company exec as saying, "100 percent virtual deployment is a when, not an if, at this point. In the virtualized datacenters 20 years from today, all aspects of computing will be virtualized, including servers, networks and storage."  It's tough to argue this.  Analysts and consultants are putting server virtualization adoption at anywhere from 20% to 80% depending on the research and whether they were measuring systems, workloads or companies. The trend towards "virtualization as the default" is something we continue to hear from customers. 

The downside, however, is the complexity.  According to one survey, "...only about half of around 200 respondents find virtualized systems easier to manage or help them meet their SLAs."   Virtualization has become another complex layer of 3rd party management added on top of the physical IT resources in the data center.  It has spawned its own type of administrators (i.e. "VM Admins") as well as management frameworks.  And, if you really love complexity, you can even add on an additional "Cloud" layer of management (director software, portal, API, licenses, etc.), to further abstract, your abstracted management! 

Before I'm accused of being some Ludite, let me say that server virtualization has been a good trend. Similar to storage virtualization, network virtualization... heck, memory virtualization. I mean, when was the last time you had to specify which module or page of RAM to use for your application?   Virtualization shields the end-user from the details -- and dare I say complexity -- of the underlying physical resource.  And as a result, typically scalability, utilization and availability are improved.

So I agree that virtualization "is a when, not an if".  But the "when" will remain a long way off until the complexity is addressed. What is needed is for server virtualization to become part of the server management, not yet another thing to install, license and manage.  Just like how Storage arrays present volumes externally, while masking the internal complexity of cache memory, RAID levels, tiering, etc., servers will have to quickly get onto this same evolutionary path.  The "when" of prevalent server virtualization will arrive when the virtualization is embedded within the server hardware itself.

Cloud Fabrics

My recent absence from this blog was a result of work-related dynamics as well as involvement in another blog effort, EthernetFabric.com.  I whole-heartedly recommend it to anyone seeking info on how the new generation of Ethernet switch products create savings and new capabilities within the data center.  And, not surprisingly, form an intelligent foundation for virtualized and cloud infrastructures.

On that note, one of the things I wrote recently was a position piece on "Cloud Fabrics" or in other words the network infrastructure required to support a dynamic cloud environment.  Here are the key elements:

1. Provide security to the resident applications, users and resources, including network access protection, user authentication, data in flight encryption, data at rest encryption, and logging;

2. Provide the data transport availability needed to ensure continuous packet delivery between the user and the cloud resource, through continuity capabilities such as link trunking and automatic failover;

3. As much as possible outside of the physical effects of distance-imposed latency, make a connection between users, applications and distance resources perform comparably to a traditional local connection through the use of data compression, acceleration, de-duplication, QoS and advanced routing capabilities; and

4. Provide transparency and control for the data traversing between users, applications and resources, through enabling management, monitoring and compliance capabilities that track data flows to the packet level, while also preserving the service-level context.

Let me know what you think of this "Cloud Fabric" concept.  I feel there's a lot of this already encompassed within the Ethernet Fabric efforts in the industry, whether Brocade VDX , Juniper QFabric, Cisco Unified Fabric or Arista Cloud Networking, to name a few.  But there are still missing on not-quite-integrated aspects of security, availability, acceleration/optimization, and especially management.  It's an exciting work-in-progress to watch -- how the vendor solutions are evolving to meet emerging customer needs.  I expect we'll continue to see more pieces of the puzzle from Spring industry events, more product announcements and the inevitable M&A activity.  Enjoy the ride.

Hybrid Cloud: The Preferred Approach

I've been a big believer for awhile now that 'Hybrid cloud' was where the industry needs to be going.  It's the big idea that truly allows companies and their IT organizations to seamlessly knit together their internal resources with those of their technology vendors.  And I'm a little biased these days working for a networking company, where it has been painfully obvious for some time that the Network is the key to unlocking a lot of latent demand in external cloud computing... with concerns over data Security, Availability and Performance as the biggest barriers to adopting externally-based Cloud services.

But aren't these insurmountable barriers, only leaving companies able to do 'Private Clouds'?  Well what is a Private cloud?  Some would say it doesn't exist - it's just a new label for what a lot of companies have been trying to accomplish within their data centers for some time now, with key capabilities being Server Virtualization, Automation, Self-service provisioning, and Chargeback for usage-based cost allocation.  Gartner called this Real Time Infrastructure. Others termed it Data Center Automation.  Others Utility Computing. 

The reality is that Hybrid cloud computing is already the preferred approach for organizations as seen in this chart from The Info Pro.  Almost 60% of companies expect to be using Both external cloud services as well as developing internal cloud capabilities.


Hybrid computing is getting top vendor support from the likes of Intel, Microsoft and others.  So we can expect to see the ability to connect across data centers -- safely, efficiently and in a manageable way -- becoming an embedded capability within the component resources that we purchase in the future.

The move to Cloud computing is happening today and the only question is at what rate. A recent Brocade study showed that 60 percent of enterprises expect to have started the planning and migration to a cloud computing model within the next two years, with key business drivers being to reduce cost (30 percent), improve business efficiency (21 percent) and enhance business agility (16 percent).  Other interesting Cloud findings included:

• More than a quarter of large organizations are planning to migrate a cloud model within the next two years; 11 percent within one year
• A quarter of organizations stated that the ability to consolidate the number of data centers was also a critical driver
• The availability of bandwidth was also a deciding factor amongst 14 percent of respondents

Conclusion: Embrace the concept of the Hybrid Cloud, and team with technology vendors that are delivering a roadmap allowing you to execute on that vision as soon as possible.

Cloud Network Optimization validated

With the explosive growth of the Cloud Services market, exceeding $68 billion this year, it was obvious to expect lots of innovation in and around this space.  I had been mostly blogging about efforts in the Cloud Infrastructure and Storage space, and was seeing a microcosm of this opportunity with new classes of optimized gear to speed and secure the links from the customer to the cloud.

We recently have witnessed the emergence of Cloud gateways that appear as local NAS but act as intelligent controllers that cache, optimize, encrypt and convert data from the LAN out to the Storage cloud. Along with TwinStrata, Cirtas, StorSimple, and Nasuni, we can now add Panzura to this vendor list.

But I still expected to see a pure-play Cloud Network product in this area.  A device that performed the caching, dedupe, and encryption of a WAN opt. appliance but specifically aimed at datacenter-to-cloud traffic, where the protocols and acceleration are tweaked for storage data and larger pipes. It would be a network device, not a storage device, thus complementing new products such as EMC VPLEX to speed storage virtualization between data centers and enabling use cases such as VMotion over distance.  I had assumed an established network player would be first to meet this need, but a new player, Infineta, took the brass ring.

Infineta has been very distinct in their positioning, focusing on datacenter to datacenter and not branch office traffic which is the established realm of Riverbed and traditional WAN optimization.  And they released a cool new video on youtube. 

It's ultimately up to the analysts as to how the markets get defined, but with this latest product entry, I'm considering Cloud Storage Networking to be a validated market.  For IT organizations, now's the time to start thinking how you can use these new products to safely and cost-effectively transition archival and nearstore data out to the Cloud.

One Year in the Cloud

The other day I had the epiphany that I've been working on my company's Cloud effort for a year now.  It was around this time a year ago when a few of us, holed up in a room, were doing some next-gen data center planning with a topic being 'clouds'.  I hadn't given the subject too much thought with regard to our product set up to that point.  But a few promising concepts came out of that meeting and the larger effort took off. 

It's all shaping up to be a big inflection point in the IT business, in some ways a lot like server virtualization, ASPs before that, and the web before that.  Hang on for another great ride.    :)

Share any interesting anecdotes of your experience to date with the Cloud.