This rather long post is basically a scripted version of the presentation -- although there are always a few things that usually get said that go above and beyond what's here.
Disclaimer: these are the slides and the story that I've personally been using recently. I'm not entirely sure if it's 100% official or sanctioned or anything else like that. Hope you find this useful and entertaining!
My favorite Chinese curse is "may you live in interesting times".
Well, if you're involved in IT, those "interesting times" have started.
Many of us believe that IT infrastructure is ripe for a seminal change in how it's built, operated and paid for.
This structural change in IT is the primary motivation behind the VCE Coalition that was recently announced.
Simply put, this coalition is about three industry-leading companies aligning investments to accelerate this industry transition.
So, let's get started ...
Things Change
Telephony. Modern power generation. Containerized shipping. Automated manufacturing.
Each one of these forms of infrastructure was subject to a radical transformation in the last century. A complete re-thinking of how things got done.
One could argue that -- now -- it's IT's turn to go through a similar transition.
I always like pointing out how we used to make phone calls. One of the biggest advances in telephony long ago is when they came up with idea of "wheels on the chair" so the operators could move around faster when they patched phone calls.When we talk about changing the nature of IT infrastructure, we want to do far more than just "add wheels to the chair".
How IT Will Evolve
One of the core tenets of the companies behind VCE is a shared view as to how IT is evolving.
At the same time, we're seeing the formation of more external clouds. Sure, there are many concerns and questions as to their suitability for enterprise IT environments, but there are certain aspects of them that are just plain fascinating.
The fact that they're flexible, dynamic, on-demand and efficient is extremely attractive to all of us that work in the IT business.
Virtualization Changes Everything
We're meeting more and more customers who've reached the "tipping point" in virtualizing their environment.
They now have the opportunity to change their internal operating model to look more like a service provider or cloud, and less like a traditional, physical IT model.
At the same time, you've probably noticed more and more service providers using VMware to target enterprise IT requirements. They're building these external clouds to provide many of the features that IT organizations need.
Well, since both sides are using pretty much the same technology and the same standards, we have an interesting picture taking shape.
Virtualization is not only transforming both sides of the equation, it gives us the ability to easily move things around if we choose.
Pool workloads more efficiently inside the data center. Move them around between data centers. Move them to an external service provider, and back again.
Now, we all know that there's more to moving workloads than simply moving a running program. There's boatloads of information as well. And, of course, the environment has to be demonstrably secure.
But -- through the magic of powerpoint and hand waving -- imagine these environments coming together to create a hybridized environment that offers the best of both worlds.
The Private Cloud Model
In this fully virtualized model, IT has an entirely new set of infrastructure choices -- run very efficiently internally, use any number of compatible service providers, or any dynamic combination of the two.
Just to be clear, this is not old-school outsourcing. You could move a workload to a service provider on Monday, take it back on Tuesday, and give it to someone else on Wednesday.
Put differently, we believe the potential now exists to virtualize -- or containerize -- the vast majority of workloads.
And, as we'll see in a moment, this same private cloud can support client and desktop experiences that follow users where they go.
All under the control of IT.
Building The Private Cloud
So many cloud propositions start form the premise that all you have to do is rewrite everything to use their cloud.
Given that there's about ten gazillion lines of code out there, we'd call that a "barrier to adoption".
By comparison, all this model asks is that programs run on the Intel instruction set -- or can get to that if needed.
That means you can run just about any damn thing in the cloud if you choose. Off-the-shelf software. New programs written in modern tools. Even thirty-year-old COBOL code can go to the cloud.
If we look at the technology enablers of a private cloud, we think there are three.
First, we'll need a cloud operating system. That comes from VMware.
Second, we'll need cloud internetworking and unified computing environment. That comes from Cisco.
And, finally, we'll need to manage information and resources effectively in this environment -- something EMC has dubbed "virtual information infrastructure".
We see this transformation playing out in three places -- within the data center, on the desktop, and with compatible service providers.
Make no mistake, these newer service providers bring a lot to the table -- they offer you entirely new options to choose from, and here is where we find the legacy-free operational models that are so compelling.
But, make no mistake, these players can be thought of as "the new outsourcers" -- they will be making a strong case that they can do a better job of delivering IT infrastructure services than internal IT organizations can.
What Is VCE?
For well over a year, the three companies have been coordinating investments in a number of areas, and it creates a pretty compelling picture.
First, all three companies share a common vision: the evolution of IT infrastructure towards private clouds.
And, you've probably already seen some of alignment we've done around our respective roadmaps: UCS and Nexus from Cisco, vSphere and View from VMware, as well as V-Max and Ionix from EMC -- all largely introduced this year.
As part of our public announcement on November 3rd, we added more to the picture.
For example, we've introduced a reference architecture -- the Vblock -- that magnifies the benefit of our respective technologies, and greatly accelerates deployment.
And, on top of that, we've started to characterize specific use cases for virtualization at scale.
But, despite being three best-of-breed companies, there are times when people prefer dealing with only one company -- customer support, for example. So we've started to invest in new constructs that help us act as one company when we need to.
Finally, we think we bring the single most compelling partner ecosystem to bear on this opportunity -- everything from resellers and system integrators, to outsourcers and service providers.
VCE Landscape
I'd like to give you a quick tour of some the key technologies you'll find in the VCE stack, from VMware, Cisco and EMC.
Each company has very broad portfolios, but -- for the purposes of this discussion -- I'm just going to hit a few highlights to emphasize the strengths of our respective technologies.
As we do this, I'll try to give you a sense for how the integration is being done, and how we're wrapping services and solutions around the stack.And I want to make sure we're very clear as to where we are not only with enterprise data centers, but compatible service providers as well -- since that's an important part of the story.
VMware Highlights
I'm quite sure that everyone is familiar with VMware's offerings.
Pretty cool stuff, no? Simply put, they're the key technology that makes all of this possible.
vSphere is the cloud operating system that does most of the heavy lifting.
vCloud is both APIs and a partner ecosystem that extends and improves the compatible choices available.
And, finally, VMware has just announced VMware View 4 that tackles the user client experience by providing an integrated management environment.
Rather than do a deep dive on all the goodness in the VMware portfolio, I'd like to highlight just a few key features that illustrate some important points.
VMware vSphere ArchitectureVsphere represents thoroughly modern operating system technology -- this is no rebadged Linux or Windows kernel.
It creates abstracted pools of resources using cooperating hypervisors across multiple servers, networks and storage devices.
Right now, there is no equivalent technology in the marketplace.What many of us appreciate is its open extensibility -- we can easily extend any of its capabilities -- management, networking, storage, security -- in a way that we couldn't do with other operating environments.
Very often, vSphere is called a "software mainframe", because many of its concepts are eerily familiar to those who've worked in that environment -- except, this time, we're doing it with commodity technologies.
vCompute: Powerful Enough For All Applications
This year, with the combination of vSphere and newer intel Nehalem processors as found in Cisco's UCS, we're at some pretty spectacular performance levels.
I mean, take a look at these stats -- 8 virtual CPUs per VM, a quarter-terabyte of RAM, well over 300 thousand IOPs.
Folks, this is bigger than Big Unix. These are healthy-sized mainframe workloads running out of individual virtual machines
Sure, there are frequently concerns about running big apps in VMs, but sheer performance is no longer one of them.
Our default planning assumption is that, over the next few years, we'll see less and less R+D going to the proprietary RISC chips. Intel is outspending all of them combined. Already today, it's hard to make a price/performance argument in favor of legacy RISC architectures.
Well, if most of the world is going Intel, what becomes of the legacy UNIXes? Solaris? HP-UX? AIX?
Our assumption is that -- over time -- most of the today's workloads running on these legacy environments end up on something like Windows or Linux, running on a modern hypervisor like VMware -- all on an Intel architecture.
Advanced Features In VMware
Here's one example.
We all know that going from physical to virtual saves power. But, starting last year, we've been able to go one step further.
Since we're using a shared pool of servers, VMware's Distributed Power Management feature allows workloads to be consolidated on a fewer number of servers during non-peak times -- and the unused servers can be simply powered off.
When workloads increase, the opposite happens.
And, in many cases, this can result in an additional 50% of server power savings above and beyond what we got with ordinary virtualization.
This has the interesting property of turning spare server capacity from mostly opex into mostly capex -- you only pay for the server power and cooling when you need it.
Something we all want in our private clouds!
VMware Fault Tolerance
Take any arbitrary application. Put in a virtual machine, and set a flag. The virtual machine maintains a precise, synchronized copy of its state using a neighbor.
If the server fails, the second one picks up precisely where the first one stopped -- not in minutes, in milliseconds.
There's much more going on the server side with VMware, but let's take look at what's happening on the desktop.
Indeed, there's a school of thought that many organizations will build their first private clouds to support virtual desktops.
From Desktops To Users
For one thing, Windows 7 is here. And most organizations have been trudging along on Windows XP running on ancient hardware. Something definitive will need to be done in many cases
And the question is -- will you do what you did before -- buy a bunch of desktops and laptops -- or perhaps consider a new option?
From VDI to CVP
Nice trick, but it doesn't work for everyone -- especially since more and more of our workforces are becoming mobile.
With VMware View 4, we've got the second piece of the puzzle -- CVP, or client hypervisors.
These are thin layers of virtualization that run on the user device that support the exact same desktop image that's running on the server.
And -- together -- these work cooperatively to create a desktop virtualization model that works for just about everybody.
The Power of Choice
I ended up buying a Macbook Air. Very sexy.
I loaded up a hypervisor that ran the corporate XP image. When I was on the corporate network, I ran in what appeared to be a thin client mode -- everything ended up on the server.
And when I was on airplanes, I had a local image with my files and stuff. When I connected to the network, it synced in the background. All very cool.
I was then able to login using my son's gaming PC at home and did the same thing. Once I authenticated, boom -- it was all there -- and at blazing speed.When I'm in the office, I use a four-year old cost-reduced laptop. When it gets done booting, I run in thin client mode.
Here was the cool part of the pilot -- wherever I went, my desktop followed me -- network or not. If I lose a device, or want to use another one, it's no biggie. If I were to fall in love with a netbook, or maybe Apple's rumored iPad, it's all possible.
I think we'd all like to live in that world. More importantly, our users want to live in that world!
Another thing to think about is -- where do you want to point this? Last year, it seemed that most of the VDI projects were pointed at transactional workers. This year, the likely target seems to be knowledge workers who want premium experiences that conveniently follow them around.
So, once again, we think in 2010 many organizations will take a hard look at this sort of approach, especially as they consider their plans around Windows 7The New Operational (and Consumption) Model
Clouds -- of any sort -- are built differently, operated differently and consumed differently than traditional IT.
It's one thing to get comfortable with the technology, it's another thing entirely to think in terms of different operational and consumption models -- because, here, we're dealing with the 3 P's -- people, process and politics.
Let me share with you some of what we're finding. For example, a while back we studied 200 traditional IT provisioning exercises -- you know, how big, how many, and so on -- the kind of thing that IT does every day.
We came back six months later, and found that 92% of them were fundamentally wrong -- way too much, or way too little. We ended up calling this "have a hunch, provision a bunch". Wasteful of resources, not to mention everyone's time and effort.
New approach -- take a typical, ordinary request, and put it in a modest virtual machine. A "bar code" tells the server, network and storage what do to.
The user will come back with one of three statements -- one, "not good enough", turn the knob to the right to deliver more performance, availability, etc. Or, perhaps "you're charging me too much", in which case we turn the knob way to the left. And, once in a while, we'll get it just right.
Here's the point -- most of the before-the-event sizing we do is proving to be totally useless. Instead, let's start to adopt a model where we adjust things after the fact as things change, and not try to divine the future ahead of time.
Better yet, we've found that business users are overjoyed by this approach -- they get what they want, when they need it. In business, cheap is good, but fast is better!
Many organizations are ready to take the next step, and start delivering self-service computing to some of their users. The only thing better than low-touch is zero-touch!
Earlier this year, I set up an environment on Amazon EC2. The hardest part was finding my reading glasses to read my credit card info. I didn't do it because it was cheap -- I did it because it was EASY.
And I'm absolutely that the majority of the appeal of cloud-like discussions to business types is getting what they want, when they need it, and as they need it. Cheap is always good, fast and easy is better.
If you think about it for a moment, there are probably good chunks of your user population that'd be thrilled by a self-service portal. Think application test and dev, business analytics users, power users -- anyone who's got a big desktop is probably a likely candidate.
The Giant Computer
So, if you look at the speeds and feeds, it's pretty clear that VMware is helping us all build the giant computer.
Here's what the specs look like today, but it's certain that we'll see bigger numbers with progressive releases.
Some people ask the question -- why not use another hypervisor?
Well, lots of pragmatic reasons to use VMware for time being, but one big one is the ability to aggregate large pools of resources into a single cluster.
The bigger the pool, the better.
And, if for some reason today's specs don't look attractive enough, don't forget, we always can build more than one!The Cisco Offering
We all know that Cisco brings a lot to the table with their traditional networking prowess -- how can you have any sort of cloud discussion without considering the network?
Indeed, in addition to de-facto market leadership, Cisco is bringing many of the advanced features we'll need in these cloud-enabled networks.
But, in a few important areas, they've added much more to the discussion -- unified fabric, and -- more recently -- the UCS, or unified computing system.So let's get started.
Unified Fabric
Call it unified fabric, call it converged ethernet, call it FCoE -- it's all pretty much the same discussion.
We want to move from the world on the left (bad) to the world on the right (good).
The idea is simple -- wire once, and walk away. The capex benefits are pretty easy to understand -- better sharing of resources, leveraging the scale economics of ethernet, etc.
But the big play here is opex -- everytime a change needs to be made, it gets made via software -- new topologies, new configurations, short term resource swings, etc.
For these new private cloud builds, we're strongly encouraging people to seriously consider FCoE (and the supporting converged ethernet ecosystem) going forward. No need to rip and replace.
And we think this is going to prove out to be a huge benefit in these next-gen datacenters we're now building.
Clustering At Scale The idea here is to create progressively larger and larger pools of resources as part of a private cloud.
And it's another thing entirely to do this across data centers, some of which may be actually owned by service providers.
Lots of challenges to go solve, but there's a very specific network challenge that Cisco is addressing, and that's creating a single logical LAN or SAN that behaves and operates like it's in a single data center, even though it might incorporate multiple locations.
And, thankfully, Cisco is now starting to introduce technology that solves this part of the equation.
The Cisco UCS
And, simply put, this was the single most innovative computing architecture we had seen in a very long time.
There's a lot to love here -- it's the first server we've seen built and designed to support virtualization at scale. Gotta love that.
The "big memory" feature means we can support far more VMs per blade than any other offering in the market -- and that directly translates into compelling economics.
The converged fabric model means we can support a converged management model as well -- using coordinated templates to manage provisioning in a far simpler and more elegant way that we've ever been able to do in the past.
A Different Model
Build one out, and load up your virtual machines. They load balance automatically, thanks to VMware's DRS.
When you need more compute resources, rack them up without a power-down. The UCS discovers the new resources, and rebalances the load. No downtime, no reconfig exercises -- simply load and go.
Just like a network switch works!
Onwards And UpwardsBut most people want to run multiple clusters, and frequently in multiple locations.
So most of the R+D is now focused on geographically dispersed clusters, where the various nodes either all belong to the same organization, or might be a combination of owned and service provider assets.
Instead of managing individual "things" -- devices, etc. -- we're now managing a pool of resources that might not be all in one place any more.
The management model -- and the operational model -- need to change.
Thinking In Terms Of Service Delivery
When we start fully envisioning this model, it isn't long before we realize we need some new "knobs" to control overall aspects of the environment such as allocation of resources, end-to-end service delivery, and security compliance.
A network-centric frame of mind is helpful here, because -- after all -- all of these services come through a network of some sort.
The good news is that the technology now exists to run IT using these new models.
The frequent challenge is that most traditional IT organizations don't have the roles and responsibilities established for this new operational model.
This means that either (a) an existing group has to have its charter expanded to run the end-to-end model -- the NOC guys are a typical candidate, or (b) an entirely new team has to be assembled to run this new environment effectively.
Personally, I believe this transition to a service provider operational and management model will turn out to be the single largest obstacle to overcome for larger IT organizations. There are literally decades of history and culture built up around running physical IT, which is no longer entirely useful for the virtual world.
More on that in a momentWhat EMC Brings To The Table
Most people would expect EMC to supply the storage for this next-generation stack, and you'd be right.
But -- in addition to storage, there are several other contributions we've been investing in.
One is information management -- whether physical or virtual, information has to be backed up, archived, replicated and so on. There are some very interesting new considerations in these fully virtualized environments where applications and information can move around dynamically.
And, finally, no one is going to use any kind of cloud unless it's provably secure.
Our RSA division has been working hard to create the new security frameworks we need for these environments.
Storage, backup, management and security -- that's what EMC brings to VCE.
The Impact Of Storage Architecture
Much like we'd like to build giant pools of compute that can dynamically adapt, we'd also like to build giant pools of storage that can do the same thing.
You may have noticed that we're building our arrays differently to support these new scale-out environments.
A good example is this year's V-Max, which uses a scale-out clustered architecture to achieve pretty decent scalability: 2000 drives and 2 petabytes of usable capacity, for example.
But we'd like to do more than simply build giant arrays.
We'd like for our customers to be able to federate multiple arrays in multiple locations, and intelligently move information to the right place at the right time, following the workloads as they move around.
You've seen some of that thinking already in EMC's Atmos product, but there's more to come.
Fully Automated Storage Tiering -- FAST
We'd like to do the same sort of thing in the storage world, but in our world, we use different technologies.
On one hand, we've got enterprise flash drives. Incredibly fast, reliable and energy efficient, but on the expensive side.
And, on the other hand, we've got very large SATA drives that are extremely cost effective, but aren't particularly fast.
The idea behind FAST is amazingly simple -- break up storage into manageable chunks, and then move the pieces around dynamically based on how the data is being accessed.Turns out that the vast majority of applications have a "hot spot" -- 5 or 10% of the data is responsible for 90 or 95%. The problem is -- the hot spot moves around as usage patterns change.
Well, if we can use the power of the array controller to dynamically move popular information onto flash, and move the less popular information onto far cheaper SATA, we can achieve both significantly higher performance and substantially lower cost -- at the exact same time.
And that's the idea behind FAST.
We believe that, much like VMware has permanently changed the economics of computing, technologies like FAST will permanently change the economics of storage. It's that significant.
And, as we think about a bit further, there's no reason why those SATA drives couldn't be compressed, deduplicated and spun down -- making for extremely cost-effective storage.VCE Directions
Now that we've taken a tour of some of the technology highlights, let's talk about how some of these pieces are coming together -- both in terms of reference architectures, as well as specific use cases.
You may not be surprised as to the enormous amount of IT effort that is spent selecting servers, storage, network, etc. -- procuring it all, integrating the pieces, supporting it all, and so on.
Our goal here is to create entirely new options for IT organizations wanting to accelerate virtualization at scale -- without taking any traditional options away.
Introducing VblocksOne of the ways we're doing that is with Vblocks.
Simply put, Vblocks are appliances for virtualization at scale.
Representing the best technologies from VMware, Cisco and EMC, they are pre-optimized and pre-integrated for fast and predictable deployment.
With Vblocks, it's a different conversation.
You tell us how many virtual machines you'd like to run, we show you the appropriately configured Vblock.
One of the frequent reactions to a Vblock is -- hey, it looks closed, don't like lock in, etc. This sort of reaction surprises me, because the reality of the situation is 180 degrees in the opposite direction.
Customers still have the choices they've always had. VMware's products work with everything, Cisco's products work with everything, EMC's products work with everything. And the vast majority of IT infrastructure building is mix-and-match between these vendors and others.
We wanted to create a new choice to go alongside existing choices -- if you want best-of-breed, and you want it quickly, you now have a new option to consider.
Now, there's nothing preventing anyone from building their own Vblock-like solution, or combining various technologies from other vendors -- but many IT organizations are looking for a more efficient way to put capacity on the floor in a predictable and optimized manner.And that's what Vblocks are all about.
You may be looking at the big one -- supporting 3000 to 6000 virtual machines, and be wondering -- who needs that?
Well, in addition to very large enterprises and service providers, even mid-sized organizations considering desktop virtualization may need this kind of scale.
Element Management -- Redefined
People often ask -- how do you manage a Vblock?
Well, of course, you can manage it the traditional way -- server, storage, fabric, etc. all individually -- but that defeats some of the purpose here.
So EMC has built an "element manager" for Vblocks.
It sits on top of server, storage, fabric and virtualization element managers to provide an integrated experience, leveraging the template-based models found in UCS, Vsphere, EMC storage and so on.
This new element manager in turn plugs into your existing enterprise framework.Vblock Use Cases
So, what are people interested in using Vblocks for?
Well, more than a few organizations are already running 500 or more virtual machines, so you might think that these people are the obvious candidates.
But most people aren't interested in ripping and replacing what they've already got running.
They're more interested in Vblocks and VCE-related technologies for their next wave.
Some of these people are looking at virtualizing their "tier 1" applications -- the heavy workloads.
Even if they might be a bit skittish about putting that Big Database or that Big Instance on a virtualized server, there's plenty of the supporting cast and smaller versions that can be effectively virtualized today.
VCE Joint Services
So far, almost everyone has pretty much liked the idea of an integrated best-of-breed approach to next-gen IT infrastructure. Many customers are already using two, or perhaps all three of the vendors associated with VCE.
However, there are times when it's advantageous to act and behave as a single company, rather than three independent ones, and that's the basic rationale behind our investments in joint services capabilities.
All three companies, though, are very much agreed on one guiding principle -- this is all about enabling the ecosystem of resellers, integrators, outsourcers, consultants and other partners. Everything we do should be seen as win for not only our customers, but our partners as well.
Unified Customer Engagement
The plan is simple: invest in joint services where it makes sense.
On the pre-sales side, we want to make sure that we have a coordinated engagement with a customer with people who are comfortable with the combined portfolio and offering. That means we have to create a new skill set.
And, on the post-sales side, we want to make sure that there's "one throat to choke" when dealing with complex support issues. Some pieces are already in place (for example, joint customer support), others are being built out right now.
The goal, as alway, is the same: bring our respective individual strengths to the table when needed, yet be able to act as one company when needed.
Seamless Support Experience
An interesting example of how this is working out already has to do with the all-important topic of customer support.
Each of the three companies already had world-class enterprise support capabilities in place.
And customers appreciate the depth of skills in each organization, and don't want another layer between them and the people who can help them.
By using a combination of cross-training and integrated process flow, we were able to create the benefits of a unified support experience without adding yet another layer of overhead.
Put simple, call any one of us, you've called all three.
VCE Coalition Services
Another area where this approach worked is in professional and consulting services.
Again, each company has a broad range of specific strengths in different aspects of helping customers transition to next-gen environments like a private cloud, both delivered by themselves, but more frequently by working with partners.
By rationalizing and integrating the combined professional services portfolios from each company, we were able to provide an end-to-end view of the private cloud journey for customers that wanted to take an incremental path towards evolution.
But we thought we could add something new to the discussion as well.
Presenting Acadia
Early on, we were meeting more and more customers who wanted an accelerated approach to deploying and operating a private cloud model.
Sure, they could wait for all of their technology to be incrementally refreshed over time. And perhaps manage a large-scale organizational change effort at the same time.
Or, perhaps, maybe take a look at a shortcut?
That "shortcut" turned out to be the genesis of Acadia: a joint professional services venture based on standing up Vblocks and VCE environments using a BOT (built, operate, transfer) model.
Much like Vblock is a new choice for getting to good faster than traditional approaches, we wanted the same sort of alternative for the deployment, operational and consumption models that go along with private clouds.
Although Acadia may occasionally work directly with customers, the primary goal (once again) is partner enablement.
The Journey Has Begun
When people starting virtualizing their environments to gain efficiency, they were also at the same time laying the foundation for their private clouds. By putting applications and workloads in nice, abstracted and relocatable containers, the stage has been set in many IT organizations.
The primary challenge on most people's minds these days is regaining control of these large-scale virtualized environments -- and to do so in such a way that the resulting operational model looks more like a cloud or service provider, and less like a traditional IT organization. Although the technology is there to do things better, it's pretty obvious all the heavy lifting will be in people, process and politics.
The real payoff to all of this is the creation of an entirely new set of choices for IT infrastructure -- run very efficiently in the data center, use compatible service providers, or any combination. Or, perhaps, get real good at this stuff and start offering your services to others!
Any way you look at it, the transition of IT infrastructure to private cloud models has begun in earnest.
In our minds, it's not about what the future will look like -- it's about how quickly you want to get there.
"First, we'll need a cloud operating system. That comes from VMware."
People try to get away from proprietary solutions. Why would they want to buy a new (and also very expensive) one?
"Our assumption is that -- over time -- most of the today's workloads running on these legacy environments end up on something like Windows or Linux, running on a modern hypervisor like VMware"
I'm a Unix Guy, close to the community. I see more and more Linux-Admins getting interested in OpenSolaris, because it's much more mature for Enterprise deployment (oh and they get ZFS :-).
If you want to scale up, Windows/Linux are a joke, only AIX and Solaris are viable. Solaris is the main reason why Oracle wants to buy Sun. Ask any serious Oracle DBA, about his preferred platform. And he will choose Solaris, in native mode. No VMWare stuff to sell here...
Saying that Solaris and AIX will die, is just ridiculous.
Posted by: Brainy | December 01, 2009 at 02:19 PM
Hi Brainy
First, we're going to have to get you a new handle. How about "Ornery"? Or "Cantankerous?"
People are gravitating towards VMware because it delivers the goods. Have you looked at the market adoption rates lately? That much is a fact, and not really up for discussion.
I, too, was a Unix Guy. Cut my teeth on Version 7 drivers before moving on to BSD, System III, System V and all of that. Most of my early jobs were on Motorola 68k platforms -- remember those?
UNIX celebrated its 40th birthday this year. That's a long run for any technology, wouldn't you agree? And you'd be surprised what you can get out of Windows/Linux these days -- not that it can do *everything*, but more than you probably think.
Technologies don't die, they just become less important over time. And, in our humble opinion, that includes proprietary RISC, and the UNIXes that run on them.
Everything must change. Including, hopefully, people like you.
-- Chuck
Posted by: Chuck Hollis | December 01, 2009 at 05:24 PM
Why do you think, that your virtualization solution will be the only one? Oh and btw, VMWare is not even completely yours.
Other solutions are catching up fast. Virtualization is becoming a commodity, with many players.
Everyone is doing it. Sometimes even better and cheaper than you can.
And just as you say it about your own products, one size does not fit all.
What disqualifies you is, when you call UNIX proprietary. Heck SPARC CPUs and Solaris as an example are Open-sourced. That's what I call open.
ESX and x86 are proprietary. Both are closed technologies. The "old world" intelligent people want to escape from.
Posted by: Brainy | December 02, 2009 at 01:37 AM
Brainy
Are you like this with other people, or is it just me?
So, let's start at the beginning.
Never, ever have I or anyone else ever claimed that there would "only be one" of anything -- this is true for processors, networks, operating systems databases, hypervisors or anything else.
It would be dumb for me to say something like that. It would be even dumber for you to claim that I said something like that.
Strike one.
One meaning of commodity is "no room left for differentiation". I would offer that's hardly the case today for hypervisors, and won't change in the forseeable future. If you don't see it, you're not using your imagination enough.
Strike two.
All the major UNIXes have proprietary extensions not found in other versions. Software (and hardware) can be both proprietary *and* open source at the same time. And, at some point, I need to introduce you to the concept of de-facto standards.
Strike three.
Unless you can bring something better to this discussion,
you're out.
-- Chuck
Posted by: Chuck Hollis | December 02, 2009 at 07:27 AM
Chuck-
EMC has clearly done a great job in advancing the VCE story and expressing an opinion. While many of us are clearly fascinated by VMWare’s success to date, I’d like to pose a hypothetical question. Suppose an Enterprise EMC downtown Boston financial account comes to you and says, “Hey, love the overall story, but there is an element that concerns us. We have standardized on Citrix, or ABC technology. Everything else being equal, how can we implement your vision while using the Citrix Xen suite?” Is it binary, i.e., the VCE brand stands united, or, will there be some flexibility and genuine effort expended in working with customers to help them achieve their objective of private cloud computing?
Posted by: Doug | December 02, 2009 at 01:23 PM
Doug
These are great questions, and they deserve a serious answer, so let me try?
First, customers always get to choose the technology they want to choose. We, nor anyone else, are in any position to dictate how people build their IT infrastructure.
Second, each of the VCE companies has to serve broad markets, which means we all have to work with all these choices at some level of interoperability, support, etc.
For example at EMC, that means that we have to have some good proficiency with Hyper-V, Citrix, et. al. -- even though we own VMware! Conversely, VMware partners extensively with EMC competitors -- it's part of their business model.
Specifically, you'd be surprised at just how much EMC does in Xen environments, given our stance with VMware.
Now, consider this. Imagine a big industry transition was coming along, and we as vendors wanted to "double down" in a few key areas to accelerate the transition and increase the value proposition.
Vendors can't do that with everyone, it's just not economically viable (even though the marketing literature might lead you to believe otherwise), so we pick a few lead technology vendors and invest heavily.
That's what VCE is all about -- do it the way we're suggesting, and we can do more, and do it faster and better, than other alternatives.
None of the existing alternatives go away -- they're still available, as always.
However, if you're allergic to one part of another of the technology stack (be it VMware, Cisco or EMC), we default back to the traditional mode of working with customers to create more tailored and customized solutions.
These customized solutions won't do everything that VCE solutions do. They might be a bit harder to design, implement and support. There may be some other compromises along the way. But, if you think about it, that's "business as usual" for IT organizations that want to assemble their own bespoke stacks, be it for a private cloud or anything else.
At the end of the day, customers are always right, and we as vendors have to work with their preferences. But, at the same, we as vendors should be able to make big bets on creating new forms of value as well.
And that's what you're seeing here.
Thanks for the questions -- it was a good one!
-- Chuck
Posted by: Chuck Hollis | December 02, 2009 at 03:19 PM
Hi Chuck,
about this cloud story, I am thinking one other way. Why VMware doesn't provide a hypervisor for typical UNIX platforms like IBM POWER, Sun SPARC, intel Itanium(2), IBM zSeries? OK, we know that these platforms already have logical partitioning...
What I'd like to see is the platform independent application (let's say we have JAVA for this), and cloud consisting of different types of architectures (ARM for mobile phones, intel x86, IBM POWER, Sun SPARC, intel Itanium(2), IBM zSeries). With this approach, you don't need to worry about application's performance demands, because inside a cloud you can have few different tiers (like EMC does inside Symmetrix with SATA, FC and EFD drives) and application could simply travel from one architecture to another if it needs more performance.
Basically, you could have Facebook application on your mobile phone or netbook when on the road, and when you come home or go to work, have that application placed inside a cloud. Also, you could have application for telco billing as well inside this type of cloud.
Posted by: Damir Lukic | December 03, 2009 at 06:42 PM
Hi Damir
You're on the right track. Hypervisors are intimately tied to their underlying processor architecture. For example, IBM would always do a better job virtualizing, say, AIX on PowerPC than any third-party vendor. It'd be an enormous expense, and not much of a market -- although there's always Linux-based Xen and KVM if you want.
Application and experience portability is much more intriguing and useful, in my opinion. Java is the most likely candidate, which explains VMware's most recent acquisition of SpringSource.
Virtualization of the mobile phone itself is an intriguing market going forward, one that VMware is investing in. The idea is that your smartphone could have multiple personalities, for example, one for work and one for personal life.
Thanks for the comment.
-- Chuck
Posted by: Chuck Hollis | December 04, 2009 at 08:16 AM
Chuck, love the comprehensive vision you've sketched out here. It really seems like a compelling way to run and manage IT infrastructure in the future. However, we believe that much of the benefits of cloud computing - time to market, significant cost savings and ability to focus on business process comes from abstracting away the management of hw and sw infrastructure. That's precisely what higher level platforms as a service, e.g.,Force.com, or SaaS applications do. In your vision, you can manage and scale HW much more elegantly but you're still managing HW and all the SW on top of it, with all that that entails.
Posted by: Appirio_nara | December 04, 2009 at 06:59 PM