Virtualization Category Archives
April 24, 2008
Silos Belong on the Farm
Another vendor reportedly made the following statement: “We should leave [virtualization] control to the server guy and leave the network to the networking guy. That's an easier approach to swallow." I found this to be a curious statement and somewhat ironic, considering it was a networking vendor who said this.
I think it is clear that virtualization cannot continue to be a silo-ed activity if it going to make the transition from tactic to strategy. For example, if you are going to use VM portability as part of you strategy for things like DR/DC, power and cooling management or SLA compliance, you are going to have to do it in an orchestrated manner in coordination with the other teams in the data center if you are going to be successful. And, if you want to be able to do this in anything close to real time, you are also going a management framework to support this. In short, virtualization is everyone’s job.
Which, leads me to the other point this statement brings out: the need to re-think the IT organization. I believe that the IT infrastructure and the IT organization need to be mirrors of each other. I don’t think you can successfully transform your data center while clinging to existing notions of organizational structure (i.e. network gal, server guy). Some of our more forward thinking customers have seen good results by integrating into “critical teams” that span technologies. I think this is a best practice that would benefit many of our customers. We have actually been spending some cycles on the organizational impacts of Data Center 3.0, so look for more info on this in the coming months.
Posted by Omar Sultan at 01:30 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
April 23, 2008
Interop Las Vegas 2008
Just a quick invite to everyone to drop by our booth at Interop next week. We will have demonstrations of FCoE, the Nexus 5000, Nexus 7000, and our virtualized Application networking technologies as well. I'll be running around at a few presentations on Data Center as well as a fun panel on 10Gb Ethernet and where the technology is heading, then drop by and do some booth duty.
I look forward to seeing as many of you as possible next week, travel safe if you are joining us.
dg
Posted by Douglas Gourlay at 03:01 PM Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)
February 26, 2008
Cisco & Microsoft: Optimizing the Branch Together
Some people make friends easily. Others find it a hard thing to do. Still more people are challenged to keep their friends over time.
Today Cisco and Microsoft announced that they're working hard to address some of the key IT challenges our most important friends have -- our customers. Specifically in this announcement, our mutual branch IT customers and their end users.
What did the companies announce?
Windows Server 2008 (specifically Windows Server 2008 Server Core), will be hosted on upcoming versions of virtualized Cisco WAAS appliances later this year.
What makes that so interesting to our customers?
Several things:
1) The ability to flexibly design branch office IT architectures to meet information and business requirements, while actively lowering management cycles and cost.
2) Reducing IT devices in the branch, while still delivering required end user experience and local services (can you say print server, DNS, DHCP?)
3) Leveraging the network, and the benefits of WAN optimization (Cisco WAAS) coupled with virtualization, to enable the ideal mix of local branch and centralized data center services. Selectable by the customer.
What are people saying about this?
Here's one point of view: http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206900159
And here's another from Microsoft's Windows Server branch team, posted today: http://blogs.technet.com/windowsserver/archive/2008/02/26/check-out-the-latest-branch-solution-powered-by-windows-server-2008.aspx
What are Microsoft and Cisco execs saying about it? See them yourself in video: http://www.cisco.com/go/microsoftalliance
If you're in Los Angeles, CA tomorrow for the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 launch, or in another of the 250+ cities where events are occuring, you can see this for yourself: http://www.microsoft.com/heroeshappenhere/default.mspx.
We'd be keen to hear your thoughts on this integrated solution from Cisco and Microsoft, too. Send us a reply with your thoughts...
Mark Weiner
Marketing Director, Data Center Solutions
Posted by Mark Weiner at 06:30 PM Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
September 11, 2007
Virtualization This Week
Could Virtualization Fundamentally Alter the Computing Landscape?
I just read a recent article on BusinessWeekOnline. What jumped out at me: “Some experts believe virtualization could fundamentally alter the computing landscape as companies cope with storing and transmitting ever-growing piles of data….Companies gorged on low-priced servers to handle tasks like delivering Web pages and planning production schedules. The result: a data-center obesity epidemic, with thousands of machines running way below capacity.”
Second to maybe SOA, virtualization is the most misrepresented technology. The message that seems to be perpetuated is that it only applies to servers. Some people think for instance that the V-word is strictly VMWare or Xen. But critical areas of the overall data center like storage and networks can also be virtualized—a key concept given that storage capacity is growing faster and fatter than server capacity. The prescription that makes most sense here is a balanced diet of dynamic virtualization.
So what is Dynamic Data Center Virtualization?
When an infrastructure virtualizes the network and critical transport network services (like firewalls, load balancers, etc), server, and storage in the data center we call this Data Center Virtualization.
However, most data center virtualization scenarios today are actually static: resources in the data center are virtualized but provisioning of these resources is done manually and is not changed, added to, or moved too often. A better mid-term approach for enterprises and service providers in this case would be to add an orchestration system; something that links the elements together and allows for addition or subtraction of resources aligned to a situation based on actual traffic or, even better, business metrics, service level agreements, etc.
In a dynamically virtualized model, time is critical. The faster a re-provisioning event can occur, the more responsive the application can be to the business. When it takes minutes, the main problem solved is the elimination of human-errors and the assurance of compliance with corporate and regulatory policy. As re-provisioning time goes to 30 seconds, or even better, under 10 seconds, real-time and dynamic changes to the IT workload become more responsive, ensuring user experiences and IT service levels are maintained.
(By the way, two resources that offer good information on this topic are http://www.vmware.com/community/index.jspa and http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/)
From a business standpoint, virtualization of the network is important because it can drive increased efficiencies in power draw and cooling/heat dissipation in the data center (for facilities best practices and power efficiency, check out www.thegreengrid.org). It is also important because, as we all know, networks link everything together.
Are email servers used all the time? Is usage 80% or greater constantly? Do your servers peak during work-days and ebb during off hours? Why not move the instance of an email server, in real-time, to a machine with many other instances in the off hours? Then, as traffic increases, you can dynamically revert back to a dedicated machine. This would require server and network to both be virtualized and to work together--- and generate a solution that would yield greater efficiency.
Networks, servers, storage, and applications all need to be coordinated to make this vision possible. Server virtualization is a good start, but until the overall data center is virtualized and the re-provisioning times compressed, the full impact of what dynamic virtualization can enable will not be achieved.
Finally, if you’re heading to VMWorld this week, take some of this with you – I guarantee you’ll get a whole lot more out of your experience.
Posted by Douglas Gourlay at 11:12 AM Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (1)
