No good deed goes unpunished, the saying goes. And that's especially true in IT, and even more true as we consider the total impact of virtualizing our data centers.
Saw this EMC press release regarding a survey done by ESG about new challenges in managing virtual environments.
Yes, of course it's an obvious setup for new EMC Smarts and ControlCenter features that remediate portions of this new challenge in VMware environments, but I found the underlying survey more interesing than usual.
And maybe you will too ...
The Headline
"The survey, completed in September 2008, polled more than 150 IT business professionals and uncovers that while virtualization technology brings higher levels of speed and efficiency to businesses today, only 24% of respondents feel “very confident” their current management tools are sufficient to maintain existing IT service levels. Among those using specialized management tools for VMware environments, however, respondents were more than twice as likely to be “very confident” they could maintain IT service levels.
Additionally, nearly 48% report their number one challenge in tier-one production environments is isolating root cause problems within server virtualized environments. A key management challenge cited for VMware environments: the ability to map virtual machines to physical infrastructures, such as servers and applications, storage management, virtual security, and application performance monitoring."
OK, so managing virtual environments has become difficult, and getting to root cause has become even more difficult.
But, before we get to the EMC products, let's take an extended look at the survey itself.
Our Relationship with ESG On This Project
If you're skeptical of vendor-sponsored surveys, you should be. I know I am.
I cannot vouch for the specific context of this particular survey, but if it's like most of our work with ESG, we framed the questions where our interests might be, they went off and did their work, and we got the results.
We don't usually ask for (or receive!) any sort of editorial control of what they find or what they end up saying.
But, of course, we did point them to go look for certain things we suspected were out there.
As far as this survey in particular, it's useful walk through and try to understand who's answering the survey, their role, and a bit of their context. No survey is perfect in this regard, but I never try to understand these sorts of numbers without at least attempting to understand where the data came from.
Slide 2 -- Primary Virtualization Environment
The first thing that jumps out at you is that 21% of the responders named Microsoft as their primary virtualization solution.
I have to admit, that is so 180-degrees out-of-phase with my perceptions, I'd really want to understand more about demographics and methodology.
Maybe they talked to smaller shops where Hyper-V might be a more attractive option. Maybe they were dialling into Redmond.
I just don't know, but let's say my curiosity was raised.
Slide 3 -- Primary Role
Ah, a bit of useful insight as to who responded to the survey. Note that over half the responders could be described as "generalists" instead of "specialists".
This implies that many of these people worked in smaller organizations (where you wear many hats), or reached into very senior levels of larger IT organizations, or a bit of both.
My suspicion is that -- just perhaps -- it's more of the former and less of the latter.
No real argument here, it's just nice to understand who's responding, and their context.
Slide 4 -- Size of Company
More useful insight here -- note that 2/3 of the responders worked for companies with 20,000 employees or less. Half the responders worked for companies with 5,000 employees or less.
Your definition of "big" or "small" may vary, but it's clear that there's a weighting towards mid-sized shops.
Keep in mind, if you end up surveying someone who's a IT service provider, you may end up talking to a company with a moderate number of employees, but serving the needs of a much larger IT population.
Slide 5 -- What Are You Using VMware For?
Nice, confirming data here that lines up with my perceptions.
75% are using VMware in a production environment, and over a third in mission-critical or tier 1 environments.
I would think the proportions are somewhat higher in larger environments, though.
Good thing we excluded the Hyper-V crowd for this answer, though. I don't think they'd respond in the same way :-)
Slide 6 -- Where's Your Pain Point?
Now, here's where "leading the witness" comes into play to a minor degree. And it's not all entirely bad, IMHO.
If you asked someone a broader question, e.g. "what's your biggest challenge in exploiting virtualization", the answers might have wandered to topics like getting more funding, management doesn't get it, or something else.
Here, at the request of EMC, we asked ESG to drill down on specific management challenges we thought this audience might face.
The key here is to look at the "other" and "none of the above" categories. If you're fishing for something that doesn't really exist, it's usually reflected here.
A low 12% here (as compared with other similar surveys) tells me that -- yep -- this is pain point for many people these days.
They want to talk about it.
Of course, the numbers total to more than 100% because people have more than one problem.
Slide 7 -- Using Advanced VMware Features In Production?
Here's more confirmation for my general perceptions -- people are moving quickly to using the more advanced VMware features in production environments.
Put differently, the challenges of orchestrating things like VMotion, SRM aren't theoretical any more, they're showing up -- and (at least, based on this survey) they're statistically relevant.
Minor note: a 16% adoption figure for SRM (it only came out earlier this year) is nothing short of amazing, when taken in context. Confirms my personal enthusiasm for this product as well.
Keep in mind, to answer this question, you had to be using VMware in a production environment, right?
Slide 8 -- Who's responsible?
Another minor surprise here -- at least from my perspective.
You'd probably expect the 60% "server team owns it", especially if we're seeing a predominance of less-than-enormous IT shops in this survey. No surprise here.
What I found fascinating was that 12% of the responders had formed a dedicated virtualization team.
This brings up an interesting debate around "what's the best organizational construct to deploy, manage and leverage virtualization?" -- especially in presumably larger shops.
I am of the mind that virtualization's impact touches so many different parts of IT that must be re-orchestrated to fully exploit it's value -- that I'm willing to predict we'll see more of this sort of organization construct in the future -- especially in larger environments.
Slide 9 -- What Tools Are You Using?
Not surprisingly, most everyone is using VMware-supplied tools.
Or they're using existing tools that have some degree of VMware support, or waiting for their existing vendor to offer something.
But if you're a trend-spotter like me, check out the tiny 5% sliver who are going out and getting specialized tools.
In once sense, I see this linked to the last slide. Here's the likely sequence of events:
- management realizes virtualization is important, gets the server guys going on it
- management then realizes there's more to this than just the server, forms specialized virtualization team
- virtualization team realizes that perhaps they'll need specialized tools.
Now, I'm not arguing that this is a predominant trend. But I'd offer that if you were doing this survey a year ago, you wouldn't have seen any of this.
And that makes it interesting, doesn't it?
Slide 10 -- Just How Confident Are You?
Now, in all fairness, this is a bit more of leading the witness through directed questions.
I mean, how confident can you be of anything in IT these days? :-)
I'd interpret this chart as lumping the "somewhat confident" and "very confident" together, and focus on the emerging slice that has little-to-no confidence in their existing tools.
I would guess we'd find these people who are in larger environments, and whose management is hell-bent on virtualizing as much as possible as fast as possible.
On a more cynical note, I'd like to meet these "very confident" people, especially if they work in larger environments.
Must be nice :-)
Slide 11 -- What's Important To You?
Now, this is an extremely useful finding, at least to me.
And it doesn't look overly directed -- this correlates with the actual customer conversations I've been having.
At the top of the list, it's all about delivering application service levels, which is as it should be.
Everything else seems to be subordinate to this goal.Which says to me that -- ideally -- these next-gen management capabilities should start first-and-foremost with understanding applications, how they're performing, and their relationship to each other as well as other IT disciplines and concerns.
It's almost a hierarchy of needs that leads directly to an idealized product architecture.
First EMC Product Plug: that's extremely reassuring, because that's the enormous bet we've made around Smarts -- it all starts with applications, and goes from there.
Numbers 3 and 4 on this list peak my personal interest as well, since -- well -- those are the core competencies we're bringing to the table, behind #1.
Finally, looking at the entire list, we either have most of these bases covered with the broader EMC portfolio, or will very soon.
More reassurance.
Slide 12 -- "Storage Virtualization"
Now, here's where I love what ESG did here.
They didn't take a narrow view of storage virtualization (e.g. specific storage virtualization products from EMC, IBM, HDS, etc.).
Instead, they opened up the concept considerably to not only include expanded feature/function, but multiple location points for the functionality -- which, to my way of thinking, is as it should be.
And, if you see either IBM or HDS use this slide to market their wares, you've been warned!!
Top of the list?
Virtual SANs -- logically partitioned and isolated sub-domains across a broader FC infrastructure. Makes sense to me, it does.
Block-based virtualization ranks high (network or storage based), but I think we'll have to expand that list to include emerging ESX-based functionality before too long, especially if you dig down into some of the vStorage announcements that were made this week.
Indeed, I believe that these announcements -- coupled with the broader industry trends -- raises the potential is that -- before too long -- we'll re-think our definitions of what "storage virtualization" might mean in a fully virtualized environment.
Note that file-based virtualization (e.g. EMC Rainfinity) is in a near-virtual tie in terms of customer interest.
Now, if you were to listen to vendor hype, you'd think that virtual/thin provisioning would be at the top of the list -- but, no, it's way way down there at 12% -- and that stuff has been in the market for a while, hasn't it?
As a matter of fact, the most interesting category is the combination of "none of the above" and "don't know" at a combined 42% :-) Perhaps this was an overly directed question? Or is it just that the thinking hasn't evolved fully here yet?
Enough On The Survey, Already ...
OK, if you're with me so far, you'll understand why (a) EMC did this in conjuction with VMworld, and (b) in conjunction with two new-product-functionality announcements, namely EMC Smarts and EMC ControlCenter.
The ControlCenter announcement is simple, but powerful. The concepts of virtual machines and virtual provisioning have been married in a single management framework.
There's more to it than might meet the eye.
This means that when you provision both, you get an integrated view of pools, growth policies, etc. Maybe we're ahead of the market here, but that's OK with me. Also -- and some people might miss this -- reporting is different with virtual provisioning -- there's another layer of abstraction that must be captured and represented -- especially if you're in a charge back or usage-by-application type of environment.
If the ControlCenter news is practical, the Smarts ADM news is perhaps more stimulating: the ability to discover applications and relationships through a "virtual listener" that could, for example, find conversations between virtual entities running entirely in an extended DRS environment -- even when they're moving around.
And, I think this survey confirms that most people appreciate that discovering applications and their relationships is the starting point for discovering the support software and hardware assets beneath them (many of them becoming virtualized themselves!), and getting that dynamic end-to-end view that delivers on, well, that #1 priority above.
And, A Bit More Of The Same
You've heard it from me. You've heard it from Chad Sakac over at VirtualGeek. And maybe a few other places.
EMC believes that the future of computing is virtual, and VMware is leading the revolution.
We're now putting the majority of our R+D and focus on information infrastructure for this new virtual world: to help customers fully exploit its potential, and do so sooner than later.
Why?
It's simply a better way of running IT.
Courteous comments are always welcome!
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