Kusnetzky Group LLC

I recently had an interesting discussion with the folks of Zenoss. Some of the ideas touched on in that conversation follow.  This is a reprise of an article published on Zenoss' website. Thanks again, Zenoss, for the interesting discussion.

Many IT organizations have long faced the challenge created by one of the following realities:

• The IT budget remained the same year-over-year, but IT’s responsibilities grew or,
• The IT budget was reduced while the responsibilities stayed the same.

As 2012 looms on the horizon, IT executives are struggling with the budgetary process and are trying to find some breathing space in all of the bad news. Even though there are glimmers here and there of an improvement, it is clear that IT's world is never going back to what it was before.

Every obvious cost reduction strategy has already been tried or adopted

The organization has already outsourced research and development to a third party or moved development to a country that offers a lower overall cost structure. While this approach lowered some staff related costs, other issues came to the forefront. Some of them were difficult to resolve. Quality control and timeliness of project deliverables created some challenges. When bugs or workload slowdowns emerged, it was more difficult to get the right people focused on the problem. This approach has worked for some organizations but has not been so successful for others.

It is amazing to me that the same topics come up again and again when speaking with clients. This time, the topic was how to obtain higher levels of application or workload availability. The client in question wanted to understand when a continuous availability/fault tolerant system (FT) is preferred over a software-based High Availability (HA) solution. I wrote about this in April 2007 and thought I'd refresh that article here.

FT solutions go beyond HA fail over solutions to present an environment that is never seen to fail not merely an environment that survives a failure.  Some suppliers of FT technology call this "fail through" rather than fail over. I thought that was a well known concept and was surprised to find that the distinction is still not clear to some.

How different layers of virtualization technology can help

Here's a summary of how virtualization technology operating at different levels of the Kusnetzky Group model make applications and workloads more highly available:

• Access Virtualization —Access to application solutions can be virtualized.  If the back end system fails, the individual using the application is connected to another system that offers the same application. Both Microsoft and Citrix have excellent products in this area. More sophisticated access virtualization software may make this process automatic. Even more sophisticated products in this area will remember the state of the application and give the impression that nothing ever failed. Doing this last bit, however, usually involves other forms of virtualization. This fail over process, by the way, is unlikely to be instantaneous.
• Application Virtualization —Application frameworks may offer load balancing and failover capabilities. The application framework monitor, upon detecting either a failure to meet service level objectives or some other type of failure, would start the application on another machine. Once again, the process could be automatic or require manual intervention. If other types of virtualization are in use, the actual state of the application could be saved during the process. While this process may happen quickly, it is likely that individuals using the application would notice a pause or a slow-down.
• Processing Virtualization —Processing virtualization, which includes clustering, parallel processing and virtual machine software, may offer similar load balancing and fail over capabilities to that offered by application framework virtualization for selected or all applications on a given system. The key difference between the levels of virtualization is that application framework virtualization only virtualizes applications running in that framework. Processing virtualization makes it possible for applications, data management products or even basic system services to fail over to another system. As with the other forms of virtualization, the fail over process can take some time.
• Storage Virtualization —Virtualizing storage often a necessity for all of the other forms of virtualization. After all, what good is moving an application over to another system, if the data it was processing is no longer available. Storage virtualization could be implemented using special purpose software on general purpose systems or by moving the entire storage function to a special purpose storage server.

What happens if a failure or outage isn't acceptable

All of these are well and good. What happens, however, if a specific application or workload can never be seen to fail? Now we're entering into the realm of FT systems.  In this case special purpose, redundant hardware configurations are deployed that are run in lock-step.  If one component of the system fails, the other continue working and the application does not fail. Stratus Technologies is a supplier of a single-system approach. Stratus and Marathon are both able to do this trick as well with multiple computers and sophisticated, tricky software. Stratus' single-system approach would be faster because component failures are managed in hardware.

HotLink took umbrage at my resent post "HotLink invites everyone to the VMware lock-in party" and wanted to respond.  When I was contacted by the company's PR firm, I invited HotLink to respond. HotLink's CEO, Lynn LeBlanc, too the time to craft a response. 

Here is HotLink's response

In response to yesterday’s blog, I would like to provide some comments on the HotLink solution and clarifications on where we are going with the company.  Our long-term objective in starting HotLink was to provide an open, vendor-agnostic platform for managing complex heterogeneous environments whether virtualized, cloud-based or physical.  My co-founders and I have a long history in working with large, complex data centers, and we felt strongly that a new kind of automation was needed to transform these environments for the future.  With that end in mind, we built the HotLink SuperVISOR platform.  The 1st instantiation of this platform enables native, cross-platform hypervisor interoperability for VMware vCenter users spanning VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer and Red Hat KVM.  In the future, HotLink will be launching integrations to other management environments to provide native cross-platform support, as well.

Midsize companies have faced very difficult times over the past few years. Although there certainly was a need to offer an ever-increasing list of IT-based solutions, the budget simply wasn't there. In fact, it is very likely that either the IT department’s responsibilities grew and the budget stayed the same or the budget was reduced while the responsibilities stayed the same. This has been a way of life for IT for the last decade. This has caused IT departments to be increasingly creative in how costs can be avoided or reduced.

Over the years a number of different approaches have been deployed to reduce costs while maintaining previous levels of service or find ways to add new services while keeping overall costs in line with previous years.

If we look at the state of most organization’s IT department, just about every obvious type of cost reduction has already been taken. Here are a few of the steps most organizations have either considered or actually adopted.

Typical cost reduction approaches

Some IT-intensive organizations have moved portions of research and development for IT solutions  to a lower cost geography. While this has reduced staff-related costs, it often increased communications cost and application lifecycle management complexity.

as been working with VMware to increase the levels of availability and reliability of VMware's virtualization environment by hosting critical components and complete workloads on its fault tolerant servers.

If your organization relies on VMware to create virtual server environments and internal clouds,  then VMware's vSphere 5 is one of those critical components. Stratus, in a recent announcement, commented on its work with VMware to host vSphere 5 on the company's Stratus^® ftServer^® family. Stratus claims that these systems offer uptime of 99.999% or better (5.26 minutes of downtime annually).

Stratus' ftServer offers a single-system continuous computing environment that can expand up to 24 processor cores with hyperthreading to virtualize mission-critical applications, run virtualization management software, host VDI, and ensure the extremely high levels of uptime.

What Stratus has to say about its ftServer

The ftServer system is the only product -- software or hardware -- that proactively guards against downtime, data loss, and failover resulting from a failure of the server or vSphere hypervisor running on it; Stratus backs its claim with a $50K uptime guarantee. Stratus' resilient hardware and software technologies, combined with proactive availability monitoring and management services, set the standard for uptime assurance. With a broad range of server configurations and price points to select from, data-center operations running vSphere on single ftServer system can benefit from:

HotLink just announced SuperVISOR for VMware, a tool allowing VMware's vCenter management environment to not only manage VMware's virtual machine environment, but also manage Microsoft's Hyper-V, Citrix's XenServer and even KVM that is part of Red Hat's Enterprise Linux.

On the one hand this makes it possible for an organization's IT department to use just one set of management tools. On the other hand, HotLink can be seen as helping increase VMware's hold on its customer base and, potentially, bring new companies "into the fold."

Here's how HotLink describes their product:

HotLink SuperVISOR™ for VMware is a virtual integration and transformation platform that extends the robust management capabilities of VMware vCenter to all major enterprise hypervisors — including Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (KVM). Unlike overlay solutions that provide basic cross-platform features on top of native management toolsets, HotLink SuperVISOR for VMware abstracts the virtual infrastructure so you can support other hypervisors utilizing the underlying capabilities of VMware vCenter. No additional management dashboard is required!

Barry Phillips, Chief Marketing Officer and Vice President of Sales at Wanova had problems trying to comment on Why hasn't desktop virtualization taken over the world?. It appears that ZDnet's comment system wouldn't accept his comment for some reason. After telling him that "the dog must have eaten it," I promised to make is comment a central theme of today's post.

Barry Phillips' comment

Unfortunately there is confusion with Desktop Virtualization (DV). Most people think that VDI and DV are synonymous. VDI is one small use case of DV and is for static images over a high-speed connection to a thin client device. VDI is not a solution for the 600 million business PCs. For DV to be successful, it has to provide centralized image management that IT needs but enable the image to run local on the PC.

Desktop virtualization is more than merely VDI

Barry has a really good point, a point that I'd like to expand upon in this article. A whole section of my book "Virtualization: A Manager's Guide" is devoted to the topic of Desktop Virtualization. If you don't mind (and even if you do), I'd like to included a snippet of the book to support what Barry is saying.

Yesterday afternoon, I presented a web seminar "What is Desktop Virtualization and Why Hasn't it Taken Over the world?" for O'Reilly Media, the publishers of my book "Virtualization: A Manager's Guide." In spite of the presenter, it appeared that the session was well received. I thought you'd like a quick summary of the 45 minute-long session.

What is desktop virtualization?

Desktop virtualization means different things to different suppliers. For the most part, desktop virtualization is the use of one or more of four different virtualization technologies to create an artificial desktop computing environment.

The four virtualization technologies in use include:

• Access Virtualization — hardware and software technology that allows nearly any device to access any application without either having to know too much about the other. The application sees a device it’s used to working with. The device sees an application it knows how to display. In some cases, special purpose hardware is used on each side of the network connection to increase performance, allow many users to share a single client system or allow a single individual to see multiple displays.
• Application Virtualization — software technology allowing applications to run on many different operating systems and hardware platforms. This usually means that the application has been written to use an application framework. It also means that applications running on the same system that do not use this framework do not get the benefits of application virtualization. More advanced forms of this technology offer the ability to restart an application in case of a failure, start another instance of an application if the application is not meeting service level objectives, or provide workload balancing among multiple instances of an application to archive high levels of scalability. Some really sophisticated approaches to application virtualization can do this magical feat without requiring that the application be re-architected or rewritten using some special application framework.
• Processing Virtualization — hardware and software technology that hides physical hardware configuration from system services, operating systems or applications. This type of Virtualization technology can make one system appear to be many or many systems appear to be a single computing resource to achieve goals ranging from raw performance, high levels of scalability, reliability/availability, agility or consolidation of multiple environments onto a single system.
• Management of virtualized environments — In the case of desktop virtualization, this means the management of a combination of some of the following: virtual machine software, operating system, application frameworks, applications, database manager, user personalization and/or user data to create a secure, reliabile, movable artificial client system or environment.

Why hasn't desktop virtualization taken over the world?

Each of the desktop virtualization suppliers tends to use a different mix of the four virtualization technologies and pretends other approaches don't exist. This creates confusion. This confusion can be seen as one of the reasons that we aren't all using virtual desktops in our day-to-day computing.

Users of virtualized desktop environments are reaching for different goals (which also tend to direct the seleciton of virtualization technology). Some are seeking better management and control of local and remote desktop systems. Others are seeking ways to better manage operating system or application installation, operation and updating. Still others are looking for ways to isolate applications and workloads so that updated or changing environments can not have a negative impact on productivity. Suppliers are addressing these different requirements in different ways.

Scott Taback, VP of Business Development at Highland Solutions, took time out of his busy schedule to share some thoughts about SugarCRM and the IBM/SugarCRM alliance. I appreciate your time, Scott.

Please introduce yourself and your organization

My name is Scott Taback, VP of Business Development at Highland Solutions. (former IBMer leaving in 2010). Highland Solutions is a provider of transformational solutions that help companies become more responsive and cost efficient. Our core business at Highland is helping companies develop business process automation using technologies such as SugarCRM.

What were you doing that needed this type of technology?

We typically do some customizations to provide services, using Sugar's OnDemand platform didn't work for us.  About 3 years back we decided to build out our own data center to host Sugar along with the technologies we were building.  This provided our customers better responses times etc. and allowed us as a custom integrator access to the database layer and root code of Sugar.

Moving some of our Sugar workload to the IBM Smart Cloud allowed us to "outsource" some of this physical infrastructure need.  We see the Smart Cloud as a place where we can start managing infrastructure rather then deploying it.

After reading a Virtually Speaking piece on one of many competitors in the application performance management (APM) market, Jesse Rothstein, CEO and co-founder of ExtraHop, reached out to arrange a conversation about the rapidly growing area.

Since I've spoken to a number of ExtraHop's competitors over the last year, I thought it would be highly illuminating to speak with Jesse.  Here is a quick summary of what was a very interesting rambling hour that included review of management technology, the benefits of each approach, and a few side journeys into computer archeology.

There are three traditional approaches to management

There are three basic approaches to collecting, storing, analyzing and presenting operational data on operating systems, networking, storage, database engines, application frameworks and applications, all of which are critical components of  modern applications. It used to be relatively straightforward to examine the health and performance of these application components because they were all hosted together on the same mainframe or midrange system.

I will be posting as time permits throughout the day. Only public data will be discussed. Information covered by non-disclosure agreements will not be discussed.

Environment

Unlike most industry events, there wasn’t a wall of loud sound barraging analysts as they entered the conference room. IBM did, on the other hand, present the obligatory video that is meant to set the stage for the sessions that were to follow. The video appeared to be a presentation deck with a moving background and an upscale version of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumble Bee.

8:15 AM Update

Integrated Systems: The Foundation for Smarter Computing

Rod Adkins, SVP Systems and Technology Group Introduced the third annual meeting for analysts. The goal was to present a much more effective meeting allowing analysts the opportunity to speak with IBM executives, executives from IBM’s customers and a discussion of strategy, product plans and industry events.

• Rod reviewed the November 2010 STG analyst briefing and offered his view of what analysts should and ought to have taken away from the event. He also reviewed IBM’s long-term strategy and what the company was doing at that time to align IBM’s investments with that strategy.
• He then went on to describe that this event will examine IBM’s 2015 STG roadmap and what the company is doing to achieve its goals. “Smarter Computing” is going to continue to be the catch phrase IBM uses.
• Rod reviewed IBM’s 2011 year to date successes. High-end systems are providing 33% of STG’s revenue. This is up from 30% in the previous year. Overall the company has been experiencing greater than 35% quarterly growth through the third quarter of 2011.
• The company introduced SmartCloud Entry (reviewed in a previous article).
• Rod presented a comparison of how IBM is doing versus Oracle and HP. The chart was not very useful in understanding what was happening in the market. Each competitor had a line showing how IBM compares when revenue is considered. Relative percentages with no indication of total revenues really didn’t tell the analysts much.
• All of IBM’s systems are experiencing revenue growth — System Z was up 28% YTD, Power Systems were up 15% YTD, System x was up 9% YTD and Storage grew 28% YTD. IBM continues to focus on investments in systems technology, growth markets (China, Romania, India and South Asia were called out), and strategic acquisitions to expand IBM’s offering in clustering, cluster management, blade computing, and storage virtualization.
• Rod then reviewed how IBM's investments were designed to create products and services that will help customers transform their operations by delivering "tuned to task" systems and services.
• To demonstrate IBM's understanding of the market dynamics, Rod reviewed IT's challenges in the areas of cost reduction, data growth, the continued need to improve analytical processing so customers can better address the real-time needs of their environments.
• Rod then reviewed a few customer success stories. The Lego Group and China Telecom were highlighted.
• Plans for each of the systems, networking, storage and software were discussed. Onward and upward is clearly IBM's focus.
  

Integrated Systems: The Value of Integration and Optimization

Steve Mills, SVP and Group Executive, Software and Systems

Steve only has a small amount of time for this analyst forum. So, he promised to focus on a very small number of slides.

I don't often have the chance to speak with the folks of SurgarCRM. So, it was a bit surprising to have Sugar reach out to me to discuss the company's Cloud Computing strategy and present a recent example of that strategy in action — an initiative SugarCRM and IBM have been jointly working on to offer Sugar's Software as a Service (SaaS) offering on IBM's SmartCloud Enterprise cloud computing platform.

SugarCRM's Cloud Strategy

Sugar has long offered its technology as a service offering and as an open source software project. This offered customers the choice of using either Sugar's IT infrastructure or their own. Sugar realizes that customers want more choice, higher levels of security, reliability and availability. To that end, Sugar is engaged in developing packaged versions of its technology for different Cloud Computing service environments. One of the first examples to become public was the SugarCRM/IBM initiative.

We can expect to see SugarCRM's application appear in other major cloud computing environments in the future. This may mean migrating the application to other processor architectures and database engines.