 |
|
 |
 |
Dell and Perot Systems have entered into a definitive agreement in which Dell will acquire Perot Systems in a transaction valued at approximately $3.9 billion. I’m sure there are lots of good reasons for this acquisition from Dell’s perspective, but the one that stands out in my mind that it will up the company’s game in the desktop virtualization arena. Dell already has a pretty impressive presence at the endpoint and now, we are witnessing the beginning of a market with the potential to change the way companies manage, protect, and deploy desktops. At a recent Citrix event I attended, a representative from CSC referenced Jeffrey Moore and stated that he felt that we were currently in the “early majority” phase of adoption. A recent ESG survey of early and planed desktop virtualization adopters also found that 21% of respondents said their organization currently has a CDI initiative in place (in the form of an active production or test implementation).
It’s important to point out that “desktop virtualization” is the overarching term used to describe various technologies that include VDI, application virtualization, blade PCs, client side hypervisor, etc. It differs from server virtualization in the sense that it is going to be more of a services play. Customers are not going to rely on companies such as Citrix, Microsoft, and VMware as they did with server virtualization. These companies will surely help provide some of the key technology behind desktop virtualization solutions, but they will swing towards services-lead engagements to help hide some of the complexity and the many moving pieces inherent in desktop virtualization initiatives.
Dell is positioning itself to bring home desktop virtualization wins in enterprise accounts. Desktop virtualization will drive services and the refresh of endpoint devices—a win-win for Dell with the Perot acquisition!
I’m just finishing up the last of my meetings here at VMworld 2009 and the show has been great. VMware pulled in over 12,000 attendees, which is pretty impressive. Most of the attendees I spoke with said it was their only event they attended this year and that it was a good use of their time.
What’s new this year?
Nothing – lots of just moving the ball forward.
Definitely a more mature crowd than years past; it was clear that many have moved beyond virtualization as a technology and adopted it as a strategy.
What’s the most impressive thing I saw?
The investment Wyse made, the company’s presence at the show, the massive amount of traffic at their booth and their current position of strength in the market.
What was left uncovered?
The tie between SpringSource and vSphere for IT Operations
What was the biggest potential blunder?
VMworld is no longer an industry trade show. This was pretty clear in VMware’s restrictions on companies like Microsoft and Citrix. They only had a 10 x 10 booth and, from my understanding, they could not demo ANY competing technologies.
There were also some hiccups with hands on labs that are very popular.
What’s the coolest demo I saw?
F5 showed me a long distance vMotion. The demo used F5's BIG-IP solutions with VMware vSphere 4, VMware VMotion, VMware Storage VMotion, and the VMware vCenter APIs. I can see some really usefully use cases for the ability to seamlessly move the virtual machine and its associated storage over distance while the application remains online. I suspect VMware FT is next up on the list.
I’m attending VMworld 2009 in San Francisco this week and have been entrenched in all the cloudspeak. We have to stop overcomplicating what cloud means. The fact is that it means something different depending on who you are talking to and what your priorities are. Cloud is a big fancypants marketing term and not a piece of technology. Sure, as a marketeer in the technology community, I’d absolutely wrap the term cloud around my products and solutions because it stimulates conversation, which, in theory, improves my ability to sell my widgets. Cloud computing is consistently portrayed as a pretty bright blue sky with puffy white clouds and that could not be further from reality. Virtualization and cloud are also used synonymously, which is interesting. But they are not the same, nor are they dependent on one another. Hypervisor does not equal cloud computing. Sure, it can be an ingredient, but not always a requirement in cloud computing.
Cloud, to an IT administrator, is an icon in a Visio diagram used to represent anything outside their data center – i.e., the Internet. If you ask any IT administrator, I’d just about guarantee they would say they are doing “cloud” and they will all have different definitions. The IT shops ESG speaks with will also tell you that they are already doing “cloud.”
Cloud is nothing more than leveraging the power of the Internet to deliver and/or consume a service. That service can range from a single application to a complete virtual machine or a desktop. The common component is the Internet.
Two views exist in the business today.
- Technology View: IT Operations looking out the rear view mirror trying to determine which workloads to virtualize and how to do it quickly, efficiently, securely in a highly optimized environment.
- Business View: Line of business owners and application owners looking ahead to develop and run applications on highly virtualized platforms.
EMC’s acquisition of FastScale helps customers deal with both views.
- Through the use of software solutions, dynamically assemble application runtimes on physical and virtual resources – I call this “get rid of the baggage”
- Standardize deployment that leverages a common library. This is where multiple ingredients are stored and ready to be baked.
- An integrated platform that automates the process of building, optimizing, managing, and deploying of server software environments.
FastScale is a nice addition to EMC Ionix, but I find how and if EMC will leverage the FastScale acquisition with VMware/ SpringSource more interesting.It will make for a very interesting dynamic. If VMware acquired FastScale, it would have diminished some of the value of its partners and right now, VMware partners are helping make VMware a success. EMC acquiring FastScale steps around this issue for the time being and puts it in the hands of EMC to figure out how to make it work.
The FastScale acquisition will be worth watching to see how it emerges inside EMC and potentially VMware.
I’ve come to the realization that “cloud” is nothing more that a confusing marketing term, but a powerful one that captures the attention of press, media, and the vendor community. In most cases, the current cloud messaging isn’t even in alignment with ongoing IT priorities. “Cloud” is used to define a strategic vision and theorize the opportunity of next generation data centers. Try putting yourself in the shoes of IT operations and going to the IT director or CIO and telling them you need a cloud. 1) The term “cloud” has no single meaning so you will spin your wheels trying to explain what it is 2) I’m willing to bet that a large majority of IT professionals already think what they are currently doing is cloud and 3) try explaining to a CIO the cost of cloud… good luck!
In any case, I’m attending VMworld 2009 this week and, for better or worse, there is sure to be plenty of cloudspeak—and the games have already begun. Citrix, well really Xen.org, just announced Xen Cloud. I’m not crazy enough to think everyone is going stop their virtualization initiatives in their tracks and get themselves ready to stand up a Xen Cloud, but the concept and the potential strength behind the concept is intriguing. Perhaps most interestingly is the approach to incorporating infrastructure into the platform that is very Google like in terms of leveraging hardware as opposed to requiring highly integrated server, networking, and storage components like the leading virtualization providers.
You can also see what I had to say in a recent Forbes article.
More blogs to come from VMworld this week and you can also follow me on Twitter: markbowker
VMware’s acquisition of SpringSource could prove to be a brilliant offensive move—assuming the firm demonstrates its value to the marketplace and current customers. The challenge is that SpringSource is not a feature you just turn on with a license key, nor is it something that the majority of VMware customers will see value in today. VMware customers are primarily IT operations-driven and SpringSource is application development-driven. Maybe VMware and SpringSource can actually get the two parties to sit down in the same room and meet each other for the first time. That’d be a win in itself.
If VMware didn’t make the move to acquire SpringSource, it almost seemed certain that Sun/Oracle or IBM would have been the consumer. Microsoft also cannot be ignored with its Azure platform for .NET developers. Now, VMware has the potential to become more application-centric and help guide customers with future application decisions. That’s ultimately where the money is spent and what drives IT infrastructure decisions.
As businesses transition along the data center evolution curve, they take two views: One is in the rearview mirror, looking at current applications and servers and finding ways to virtualize them—this is where VMware currently dominates. The other is looking out the windshield ahead, examining existing and new applications, determining how to leverage a highly virtualized dynamic data center, and deciding what platform to develop upon to get the greatest flexibility and choice at the optimum cost—this is where SpringSource plugs in.
Now, VMware/SpringSource can deliver the value of virtualization technology while demonstrating the value of an application platform as businesses transform their data centers into highly dynamic environments where change is embraced.P>
Desktop virtualization isn’t something you just order up and flip the switch on. Desktop virtualization comes in many flavors, including centrally hosted VDI images streamed locally, desktop images executed and managed centrally, local hypervisor hosted many images, hosted local image with no central control, and the list goes on. Then you lay in some application virtualization and the fun really begins.
It is becoming clear that desktop virtualization is going to take a hybrid approach that involves multiple pieces of technology that may even be from different vendors. The trick, then, is gluing it all together and matching the technology with the user.
We see senior IT leaders and business executives leading the charge to find more efficient ways to deploy, manage, and secure the desktop operating environment—desktop virtualization is a key ingredient in doing so. It will be interesting to watch for server administrators carry the success of server virtualization to the desktop.
ESG recently surveyed 480 North American and Western European IT decision makers and found significant early use of and interest in VDI Technology (see Figure below).
Since VDI technologies are relatively new, the fact that 21% of organizations surveyed already have some initiative underway is a significant development. This reflects the reality that managing personal computing environments has become a more and more challenging task for IT due to growing numbers of corporate applications, the increasing globalization of the workforce, proliferation of remote work agreements, and severe IT budget constraints.
In an effort to help accelerate the adoption of desktop virtualization, Wyse announced new virtualization software for end-point devices to help ensure the end-user experience is uncompromised. Wyse Virtual Desktop Accelerator (VDA) is a software-based solution for select Wyse thin clients as well as desktops running Microsoft Windows XP Pro operating system.
Wyse’s software approach is wise ;-) considering where companies are with their desktop virtualization initiatives. While we see a growing interest in desktop virtualization technology, we also see it being deployed on a limited basis for a specific set of users based on their role and workspace requirements. Wyse VDA can help these customers stretch their solutions further away from the data center and also helps them transition from traditional desktops to thin clients.
‘Cloud computing' is nothing more than a service (ideally self-service) model where business workloads are deployed and transparently executed internally or somewhere on the Internet with businesses only paying for what they consume. With that said, ESG speaks with plenty of IT organizations that deploy two physical servers and a handful of virtual machines and call it their cloud. Are they wrong?
Achieving a highly automated IT environment controlled via business policy requires a few important stepping stones along the way. We also have to keep in mind that businesses may choose to adopt the cloud in many different forms: managed service, SaaS, infrastructure as a service, test/ dev, etc. ESG even sees businesses looking at hosted desktops!
Here are some key stages in the evolution to keep in mind:
Virtualize
Virtualization at all tiers is a key ingredient to cloud computing. Server virtualization, network virtualization, storage virtualization, and desktop virtualization are all important for a dynamic, fluid environment.
Standardize
At this stage, the new computing infrastructure is the platform of choice. For example, companies adopt a “virtualize first” policy. Dedicated physical infrastructure incurs a penalty and new applications are developed either ready to use the cloud or specifically designed for the cloud.
Automate
Now that the environment has becoming highly virtualized and standards are in place, business policies begin to drive the underlying infrastructure. For example, an application or line of business owner utilizes a self service window that transfers the control of being able to dial in (or out) performance, availability, security, bandwidth, etc. and the infrastructure seamlessly reacts—and they only get charged for what they consume. From their perspective, the workload may be using local IT services or Internet based services... but it shouldn’t matter to them.
Cloud computing is ultimately all about operational efficiency that leverages a highly dynamic, self healing, automated IT environment that can grow and shrink on demand—enabling the right size environment all the time.
Bob Laliberte and I recently attended the IBM Cloud Computing Meet the Experts event in Littleton, MA. While other companies are talking about the future of cloud computing, IBM has been actually delivering cloud services to enterprise customers and is now offering packaged solutions. Though just recently announced publicly, IBM has been refining its service offering through actual engagements over the past few years. IBM’s focus is on solving business problems by enabling a new consumption and delivery model for Enterprise IT organizations.
See a full description of IBM’s recent announcements and ESG analysis here.
|
|
|
