Virtually New York City

By Steve Duplessie
Expert Author
Article Date: 2007-10-01

Yes I'm a Sox fan. Yes I'm a Pats fan. I also love New York City - not the teams, but the City.

Where else on earth can it take 2 hours to go 12 blocks in a cab because the psychotic President of Iran was in town along with our very own GW - who both flanked the Hilton where I was speaking at Decisions. And if that weren't bad enough, apparently the President of Iraq was staying at the Hilton, him being an HHonors member I guess. There were black Tahoe's everywhere and roughly 11,000 secret service agents all over the place.

I spoke about storage virtualization technologies - and my premise was that people need to stop being afraid, start actively embracing, and realize that they already do it (RAID, for example), and that each time they adopt an incremental virtual step they end up automating a ton of error prone, boring, tactical tasks that frees them up to move on to the next thing. I think the crowd got it - after years of preaching. Interestingly, the reason I think they were paying more attention than normal was because of VMware. I asked how many of them did NOT have a VMware or other server virtualization effort under way and approximately 4 out of 400 hands went up. I can assure you at least 2 of those folks didn't understand the question. Server virtualization has the following enormously relevant intersection points with the data layer;

1. Server virtualization implementations mean people are going to buy brand new networked storage configurations - finally getting away from DAS. Most will not utilize their old stuff even if it is already networked.

2. Those moving to a virtual server world are buying MORE capacity than they currently have on the servers they are consolidating - probably because it's just hard to buy small disks anymore.

3. iSCSI is on fire in a virtual server play - which makes sense as IP is virtual already and the ability to seamlessly move IP addresses around has existed for 184 years.

In short, server virtualization is a perfect inflection point for storage folks to finally get rid of the DAS that caused such huge problems for them, and to start dabbling with iSCSI SAN's. NAS, by default almost, continues to be a supremely viable alternative for shared storage in a virtual server world.

Side Note: If VMware had a real clustered distributed file system - hidden beneath anything you needed to ever see or deal with - can you imagine how powerful it would be? They have already effectively eliminated the need for clustering for high availability, have the capability to fluidly move entire virtual machines from place to place, can create virtual multi-processor environments, and dynamically schedule changes based on time of day or workload - if they had a mobile, distributed lock manager underneath it all they could effectively consolidate all of your storage assets and enable true data sharing - not just disk sharing. VMware is as close as anyone to really having the "data center operating system" that I was rambling about a few years ago. If they were able to span outside physical boxes, the game would be completely over.

Anyhow, perhaps what I like most about NY are the people. Sure they have outrageous accents, but what you have to love about them is that they will call a spade a spade. I spoke at this Wall St. CIO type private event at the (ridiculous rich guy) University Club put on by Incipient (who was good enough to pay for the event, and smart enough to not attempt to dictate the conversation - I have to believe that not only myself, but all attendees appreciated that immensely). There were 25 Wall St. IT hitters - none afraid to take me (or anybody else) on in any area. I really do love the fact that these folks have lived through the wars, have some outrageous opinions (they collectively felt VMware and server virtualization in general was more work than it was worth - which was the first time in years I came to the realization that these guys were going to follow instead of lead - at least in this area), and aren't afraid to tell you what they think and why what you (I) think is stupid. I felt at home with these folks, until one gentlemen spouted out the proverbial "I go down and it's a billion dollars an hour……". All I could think was that if it were me, I'd just cry and never leave my bed if I had to do anything that caused a billion dollars an hour to be at risk.

So I met some interesting folks, who lead me to believe that while the mass market for network based virtualization is still a ways away, the money on Wall Street continues to be bullish and almost insistent that it will happen. They like the Incipient play. A few talked about the Acopia/F5 play and really, really liked that one. All in all, some great conversation was had.

Now, I shall be refraining from my NY love affair until the playoffs are over.

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About the Author:
Steve Duplessie is the author of the "Steve's IT Rants" blog, and the founder and Sr. Analyst of the Enterprise Strategy Group.