Michael Dell answers the vertical integration issue
We’ve featured Dell quite a bit on this site recently, including its homogeneous storage hypervisor approach, its IT services strategy and introduction of higher temperature tolerances for its servers. It’s been undergoing a slow but dramatic change in status from a trader to an integrator – fuelled by its acquisitions. I asked Michael Dell about whether he saw vendor pull or user push as the reason for more vertical integration at his company – he answered that it was a bit of both. Vertical integration will make heterogeneous ‘outside the box’ hypervising different.
I’ll bring my own device if you loosen up your network
Apple’s grew its revenues by 63% and shipped 134 million iPhone and iPad in 2011, making it easily the fastest growing hardware vendor in the Enterprise market, even if it only represents a small single digit proportion of its business. It’s just one of a number of hardware suppliers arming consumers with new mobile devices – and they want to use them at work.
As more companies say ‘bring your own device’ I hear users reply, ‘then loosen up your network!’ and there are many cultural, technical and financial consequences to consider.
We will need hypervisors to handle heterogeneous networking as well
Servers got hypervisors a long time ago – IBM put them into mainframes in 1967, the Unix operating systems got them in the 1990s and VMware and others added them to x86 servers from 2003 onwards, opening up a heterogeneous world for customers in the progress. This resulted in a measurable damping effect on server hardware sales. We’re currently doing as much research with users and vendors as we can to look at a similar inflection point in the storage market, as hypervisors promise to open up similar advantages and change the economics. Networking represents another pool of resources that needs democracy. Just as EMC rules the storage market, so Cisco has an even stronger lead in networking.
IBM makes SVC heterogeneous – certifies hundreds of arrays
For storage hypervisors to be successful they need to allow users to manage storage as a pooled resource rather than just a number of point-products, as well as the connection of arrays form multiple vendors underneath a common management suite. For the market to take off in a parallel way to the server hypervisor market ten years ago, heterogeneity is a vital component. No matter how well snapshotting, thin provisioning and other advanced storage features are supported, keeping customers tied solely to a single product line will look out-dated and lead to claims of lock-in for those vendors, currently in the majority, who choose not to participate.
Centrix Software encourages you to think about the user – not the device
Centrix Software believes that in a typical company the top 10 applications account for 90% of usage; 50% of them are used less than 10% of the time and a staggering 50% of them are never used once installed. It suggests different ways to deliver them as a result of in-depth analysis – from base-build and the Web for the most used, through streaming and self-service deployments for moderately used ones, through to user installed or ‘rationalised’ for the least utilised.
The new generation changes IT, while IT defines their lifestyle
New generations entering the workforce are changing IT priorities in all sorts of areas. For instance BYOD strategies bow to the inevitable failure of companies to exert complete control the use of IT by their staff; Gaming is changing they way project planning is done in many companies, since IT staff have less fear of initial failure if they’ve played thousands of games which they always lose; the extensive use of social media and the consumerisation of IT is leading to new ways of running product design, support, HR and sales systems. For IT managers it’s important to separate the style from the policy.
ownCloud adds control and compliance to sync and share
ownCloud’s execs Markus Rex and Matt Richards recognise the importance Dropbox has had in redefining data access in producing an easy-to-use user ‘really cool’ experience and believe it is in the consumer space to stay. However it can be a nightmare from an IT admin point of view as the application is tied to a personal account outside the control of the IT department. Their company proposes an alternative – a sync and share application under the control of an organisations IT department.
Does Microsoft need a virtualisation guru?
Microsoft is the most successful software company of all time, with revenues of $72 billion and net profits of $23 billion in 2011. In the business area it has been active in adding virtualisation and services to its packaged software business and today its Hyper-V server hypervisor is of vital importance to users. We think it will be even more successful if it combines its various virtualisation businesses under a single umbrella.
Red Hat adds European partners to its virtualisation ecosystem
Red Hat announced today that it has signed up a number of Premier Business partners in Europe to help users embark on Cloud Computing projects, including Sabeo, Quru and LinuxIT. We’ve noted before that the relative youth of KVM and associated systems management products mean it lags behind both Microsoft’s Hyper-V/Sytems Center and (especially) Vmware’s ESX/vCenter combinations in terms of being the hub of a virtualisation ecosystem. Signing up these and other partners which specialise in the implementation of Open Source virtualisation projects is an important stem towards catching up.
Chasing down virtualisation bottlenecks
Virtualisation has been with us for a very long time since IBM added it to mainframes in 1967: it came to Unix servers in the 1990s and to x86 ones from 2003 onwards. Utility computing models of the late 1990s tended to identify ‘pools’ of resources including servers, storage, clients and networking.
Virtualisation in the server space has the dual value of increasing performance and reducing hardware costs, even if they need new budgets for the hypervisors and virtualisation management software. While innovative storage suppliers have added new features to handle boot storms associated with VDI, most users have to select a single vendor’s portfolio to take advantage. Storage hypervisors offer a way to reduce costs by creating heterogeneous storage pools.