ExtremeLabs, Inc

And The NOC is Cloudy All Day

Once upon a time in the computer industry, there were data centers, and little and diffuse installations of “network servers”. Those servers eventually replaced most all of the iron in data centers. The racks of servers were termed “server farms”. If the servers were located someplace else, say in a different city alongside other servers, they were called “server hotels”. You’d “park” the servers remotely to suit distributed network needs.

Maybe the servers might be in a branch office somewhere, connected by some type of trunk line back to the data center. Maybe the trunk line was on a private network– not the Internet– or maybe they were linked together via virtual private connections, or “virtual private networks”, a/k/a VPNs. Now the terminology has changed.

It’s all about “cloud computing”…. whatever that means.

Ten encounters yields ten definitions by sales and marketing people. My rough survey at VMware World revealed that the definition is looser than a two year old’s shoe strings. There’s a vacuum of gradations and taxonomy to describe what cloud is and means. So I’m going to invent my own shortly.

Data Proliferation for Fun and Profit

Along with virtual machines is an incumbent data storage problem. VMWare World vendors are also trying to satiate the need for storage constructs, ranging from data de-duplication through to Fiber Channel over Ethernet, iSCSI, huge racks of pre-disposed disk arrays, and so on.

Here, too, is ambiguity and solutions-in-search-of-problems. What’s nice to see, however, is the increasing diversity of solution sets for storage networking, as though they’d been invented yesterday. Many are merely warmed over constructs with the new secret VM or cloud sauce, while still others have wonderful management controls for organizations controlling thousands and thousands of VM instances– along with other resources.

The bruisin’ comes when one considers the seemingly proprietary nature of many of the solutions. Capex investments into many of these SAN construction kits are both enormous, and a linear vendor relationship play as lots of this stuff isn’t swappable among vendors. Add in backup/archiving/compliance into the mix, and it becomes much like multi-level chess games with horridly expensive commitments and outcomes. Nonetheless, data proliferation has become an onerous and unstoppable force to deal with. The sadness and the bruisin’ comes from lack of commoditization of the building blocks to make SAN solutions flexible and interchangeable. It’s like we’re reinventing hallowed altars of mainframes all over again.

I’d call it VMWorld 2009, but it’s not. What was once an egalitarian show for VM platforms has now limited certain vendors, and has made the show very VMWare-specific. That’s not to say that VMWare hasn’t got a great product line and thought dominance, rather, they’ve made the mistake of limiting the competition.

This means that VMWorld is now a vanity show, not that there isn’t something to love. The sessions are packed, and there’s a bit of misery over the fact that reservations for many sessions have been full for days now. It’s not an inexpensive show to attend, and it’s about 14,000 internationally enthusiastic people trying to make sense of virtualization.

First, there’s something called ‘cloud computing’ which is a term that’s now so nebulous as to have been reduced to anything you might want to associate with the word ‘cloud’.

Then there’s storage virtualization, which means storage not in the server where an operating system instance is living. Lots of that here, that is, dislocated storage.

Then there’s something called VDI, which comes in lots of forms that essentially launch sessions of your favorite operating system (if that’s a form of Microsoft Windows) on a computer some place else. From there, what you can do with that session varies highly. We’ll describe it later.

The show is very successful, and it also shows why vanity trade shows/conferences are dangerous. You think you’re hearing an industry message, but in reality, you’re hearing a subtle and filtered vendor-specific message, and that message is from VMWare. I wish for the old days of pseudo-egalitarian platform virtualization. VMware/VMWorld’s message is now dominant. Good for them. Bad for us.