Rethinking virtualization: Why enterprises need a sustainable virtualization strategy over hodge-podge approaches

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Enterprises today need a better way to prevent server sprawl and complexity that can impact the cost of virtualization projects. Three important considerations are instrumental for effective enterprise virtualization adoption, and they often amount to a rethinking of virtualization.

For example, one important question is, How do enterprises manage and control how network interconnections are impacted by widespread virtualization? Second, how can configuration management databases (CMDBs) help in deploying virtualized servers? And third, how can outsourcing help organizations get the most bang for their virtualization buck?

Rethinking virtualization becomes necessary to attain a sustainable enterprise virtualization strategy because virtual machines (VMs) present unique challenges.

To get to the bottom of the larger, pro-active means of virtualization planning, I recently interviewed three executives from HP: Michael Kendall, worldwide Virtual Connect marketing lead; Shay Mowlem, strategic marketing lead for HP Software and Solutions, Ryan Reed, a product manager for EDS Server Management Services.

Here are some excerpts:

Mowlem: Certainly, many companies today have recognized that consolidating their infrastructure through virtualization can reduce power consumption and space utilization, and can really maximize the value of the infrastructure that they’ve already purchased.

Just about everybody has jumped on the virtualization bandwagon, and many companies have seen tremendous gains in their development in lab environments, in managing what I would consider to be non-mission-critical production systems. But, as companies have tried to apply virtualization to their Tier 2 and Tier 1 mission-critical systems, they're discovering a whole new set of issues that, without effective management, really run counter to the cost benefits.

... For IT to realize the large-scale cost benefits of virtualization in their production environments they need to prove to the business that the service performance and the quality are not going to be lost. ... The ideal approach should include a central vantage point, from which to detect, isolate, and prevent service problems across all infrastructure elements, heterogeneous servers, spanning physical and virtual network storage, and all the subcomponents of a service.

We provide tools today that offer native discovery and dependency mapping of all infrastructure, physical and virtual, and then store that information in our central universal configuration management database (UCMDB), where we then track the make-up of a business service, all of the infrastructure that supports that service, the interdependencies that exists between the infrastructure elements, and then manage that and monitor that on an ongoing basis. ... Essentially a configuration database attracts all of the core interdependencies of infrastructure and their configuration settings over time

Kendall: When you consolidate a lot of different application instances that are normally on multiple servers, and each one of those servers has certain number of I/O for data and storage and you put them all on one server, that does consolidate the number of servers we have.

[It also] has the tendency to expand the number of network interface controllers (NICs) that you need, the number of connections you need, the number of cables you need, and the number of upstream switch ports that you need. ... Just because you can either set up a new virtual machine or want to migrate virtual machines in a matter of minutes, it isn’t as easy in the connection space. Either you have to add additional capacity for networks and for storage, add additional host bus adapters (HBAs), or add additional NICs.

We did some basic rethinking around how to remove some of these interconnect bottlenecks. HP Virtual Connect actually can virtualize the physical connections between the server, the data network, and the storage network. Virtualizing these connections allows IT managers to set up, move, replace, or upgrade blade servers and the workloads that are on them, without having to involve the network or storage folks or being able to impact the network or storage topologies.

Reed: Business services today demand higher levels of uptime and availability. Those data centers, if they were to fail due to a power outage or some other source of failure, are no longer able to provide the uptime requirements for those types of business services. So, it’s one of the first questions that a virtual infrastructure program raises to the program manager.

Does the company or the organization have the skill set necessary in-house to do large-scale virtualization in data center modernization projects? Often times, they don’t, and if they don’t, then what is their action? What is their remedy? How are they going to resolve that skill gap?

... [And there's] a hybrid model, which would be one where virtual infrastructures and non-virtual infrastructures can be managed from either client or organization-owned data center -- or the services provider data center. There are various models to consider. A lot of the questions that lead into how to plan for this type of virtual infrastructure also lead into a conversation about how an outsourcer can be the most value-add.

Outsourcers nowadays are very skilled at providing infrastructure services to virtual server environments. That would include things like profiling, analysis planning, mapping of targets to source servers, and creating a business value for understanding how it’s going to impact the business in terms of ROI and total cost of ownership.

Choose the right partner, and they can grow with you. As your business grows and as you expand your market presence, choosing the services provider that has the capability and capacity to deliver in the areas that you want to grow makes the most sense.

The traditional outsourcing model is one where enterprises realize that the data center itself is not a strategic asset to the business anymore. So they move the infrastructure to an outsourcer data center where the services provider, the outsourcing company, can provide the best services with virtual infrastructures during the design and plan phase. ... We’ve been doing this for 45 years, and it’s really the critical piece of what we do.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Read a full transcript of the discussion. Download a pdf of this transcript.

Attend a virtual web event from HP on July 28- July 30, "Technology You Need for Today's Economy." Register for the free event.

Software AG seeks IDS Scheer in webMethods aquisition follow-up act

This guest post comes courtesy of Tony Baer’s OnStrategies blog . Tony is a senior analyst at Ovum. His profile is here. You can reach him here.

Who says there are no second acts in life?

After having caught its breadth with the webMethods acquisition almost exactly two years ago, Software AG has struck again with an offer to buy roughly half the shares of IDS Scheer from the company’s founders. The offer, worth roughly $320 million, is still subject to regulatory review.

Both deals are similar in that they are major, but their impacts will be different. webMethods expanded the Software AG business horizontally, adding critical mass to a new SOA middleware business that it was only beginning to build. Additionally, webMethods was a less mature business with more headroom for growth.

By contrast, IDS Scheer simply deepens one of Software AG’s existing businesses: webMethods Business Process Management (BPM). It adds the ARIS process modeling language, which would provide yet another onramp for webMethods BPM customers. And IDS Scheer is a pretty mature business, with the brunt of its installed base being large SAP customers who have used the ARIS language to model their SAP applications. There obviously aren’t a lot of new SAP installations going in these days.

But in other ways, webMethods could give IDS Scheer the jolt that the ARIS business could use. While Software AG’s numbers continued to grow in spite of the recession, IDS Scheer’s business has flattened out with what little growth occurring attributable to maintenance streams.

For Software AG, IDS Scheer’s maintenance streams resemble those of its legacy ETS data management business, which has provided the company the annuity revenue

Just about the only thing that surprised us in this announcement was that SAP didn’t act first. Their customers only happen to form the majority of the ARIS base.

flow to fund its acquisitions. But that’s where the similarity ends. The webMethods BPM business, which is much earlier in its growth curve, represents a potential greenfield base for ARIS. Better yet for Software AG, it provides a foothold into the SAP customer base where the company has not been heavily present. And, although SAP is also a player in the middleware space with NetWeaver, it has not been terribly active with BPM.

More interestingly, it throws down a gauntlet to Oracle, which currently OEMs the ARIS language as one of the options for its Fusion BPM middleware stack. Although Oracle promotes Fusion’s “hot pluggable” best of breed strategy, probably the last place Oracle wants best of breed is in the BPM stack. With ARIS providing a direct onramp to webMethods BPM, and in turn the Software AG SOA stack, continuation of the OEM deal provides Software AG the opportunity for a wedge strategy.

As for IBM, making ARIS native to the webMethods BPM suite provides a line of defense against WebSphere incursion into the SAP installed base. Although hardly a show stopper, it provides Software AG yet another tool in its arsenal to compete with IBM WebSphere.

Just about the only thing that surprised us in this announcement was that SAP didn’t act first. Their customers only happen to form the majority of the ARIS base.

Postscript: Here’s hoping that maybe we’ll have a chance to hear Professor Scheer’s mean baritone sax at Software AG events.

This guest post comes courtesy of Tony Baer’s OnStrategies blog . Tony is a senior analyst at Ovum. His profile is here. You can reach him here.

Rackspace takes open source approach with release of Cloud Servers API

Positioning its cloud hosting services as an alternative to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Rackspace announced today the public availability of Cloud Servers API based on representational state transfer (REST).

Taking an open-source approach, Rackspace’s 43,000 cloud-computing customers played a major role in the API specifications, explained Emil Sayegh general manager for The Rackspace Cloud, formerly branded as Mosso cloud hosting. They overwhelmingly preferred the newer lighter-weight REST approach to the older heavy-duty SOAP standard that Amazon uses, he said.

“With the number of companies that provided input into this API, the way I see it this is their design,” he told BriefingsDirect. “This API is based on their input.”

This open community approach is a major differentiator between Amazon and the Rackspace alternative.

It may very well also be a difference with Microsoft and its Windows Azure offerings, the initial pricing of which was also unveiled today. See Mary-Jo Foley's take.

The next step in Rackspace’s strategy is to open source the API, which according to Sayegh will be announced soon. He notes that Amazon has no announced plans to go to open source.

“What we’re seeing is customers are really clamoring for an alternative to Amazon,” Sayegh said, acknowledging that Amazon is the market leader while positioning Rackspace as the number two that is trying harder.

“We have the largest platform as a service (PaaS) in cloud sites,” Sayegh said. “We are definitely in terms of size second to Amazon.” He sees today’s release of the API strengthening the Rackspace Cloud position in the market.

I recently talked with Mosso co-founder Jonathan Bryce, and a group of analysts, on the subject of PaaS and its role in propelling cloud computing forward. Read a transcript.

Prior to today’s API release, customers used a Web-based control panel to manage their Rackspace cloud usage. This meant they had to manually scale up or down as their business demands fluctuated.

The API allows developers to programmatically interact with the Rackspace cloud

What we’re seeing is customers are really clamoring for an alternative to Amazon.

servers so scalability can be made automatic, Sayegh explained. The control panel option is still available but the API offers greater choice and flexibility.

“People are raving about how easy it is to use,” he said. As an example, he pointed to Michael Mayo, a developer working alone who was able to create an iPhone remote cloud server management app based on the new API in just three days. Sayegh said even he was surprised that a lone coder could use the API to build an application that quickly.

Rackspace Cloud currently offers three cloud hosting products:

• Cloud Sites, which provides pools of servers for customer Websites.


• Cloud Servers, which provides server capacity that can be scaled up and down as the customer requirements change.


• Cloud Files, which provides “unlimited storage” for images, large files, and backups.

BriefingsDirect contributor Rich Seeley provided research and editorial assistance on this post. He can be reached at RichSeeley@aol.com.

Paglo SaaS offering provides means to harness untamed collection of log and IT resources data

Paglo, the IT management software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, recently announced a new low-cost service that allows companies to tackle the Herculean task of trying to winnow out a rapidly growing mountain of log data.

With log data piling up in terabyte leaps and increasing regulatory pressure to maintain that data for several years, companies now find themselves in danger of being swamped with information about operational events and the daunting challenge of making sense of it. [Disclosure: Paglo is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Paglo, Menlo Park, Calif., has upgraded its SaaS log management application, Paglo Logs, for IT professionals to automatically capture and store their logs and instantly search and analyze them. The expanded service provides a powerful Google-like search capability to enable rapid discovery of key operational events, a platform for meeting compliance requirements, and a way to accelerate the investigation of security incidents.

I was impressed with Paglo when they first came out, and the additional services -- now extending to capture and search of expansive sets of IT assets and other metadata on their performance -- makes it a powerful tool for the cloud era.

How can you be responsible for performance on systems that cross company or provider boundaries? With SaaS offerings like Paglo, you can set up log gathering and search across all the systems that support a business process, regardless of their sourcing. Very cool.

As on-demand and with a "zero footprint" architecture, the Paglo Logs service collects rich systems data from all networked devices and requires no additional software or appliances to use. Paglo Logs allows users to:

• Accelerate problem resolution by going directly from the logged events to the underlying infrastructure, to view health and performance data or to access a particular machine.
  
  
• Meet the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS) by tracking all devices, software and configurations, monitoring wireless access, and securing central log collection.
  
  
• Provide both developers and operations the ability to troubleshoot application issues and understand user behavior without logging into the production servers.
  
  
• Improve their security profile and incident response by immediately receiving alerts and using saved searches and dashboards.

To maintain security, each business using Paglo has its own search index that keeps the log and network information separate and private from other subscribers. Setting up requires no appliances, on-site dedicated servers

As I said in the Paglo release on the news, "Companies need to harness and analyze the information explosion coming from all of their computer, server, network and log data. It's a very productive way to improve operating efficiencies, gain a clear understanding of true IT costs, and to meet compliance requirements. As an on-demand service, Paglo helps drop the complexity barriers to quick and effective log search and analytics."

The services come in three flavors, Paglo IT, a more complete offering; Paglo MSP, targeted at managed services providers, and Paglo Logs, for the full search and visualization services (and with a free introductory offer). The services are designed to appeal to security professionals, IT administrators, and developers of on-demand applications and services.

The new Log Management service is available immediately and accounts can be created directly online. A free trial is available at https://app.paglo.com/signup?product=logs. Paid plans start at an aggressive $99 per month.

Don’t use an ESB unless you absolutely, positively need one, Mule CTO warns

“To ESB or not to ESB,” that is the question Ross Mason, MuleSource CTO, raises in a his blog this week.

It would be heresy among marketers at many vendors, but the MuleSource CTO is actively discouraging architects and developers from using an enterprise service bus (ESB), including his company’s open-source version, unless they are sure they really need one.

Misuse of ESBs leads to overly complex architectures that can be more difficult to remedy than a straightforward Web services-based architecture that omits the ESB in early versions of an enterprise application, Mason argued in a phone conversation about his blog.

“There are two main mistakes I see most of the time,” he told BriefingsDirect. “There’s not enough of an integration requirement or there’s not enough use of the ESB features to warrant it.”

You don’t need an ESB if your project involves two applications, or if you are only using one type of protocol, he explains.

“If I’m only using HTTP or Web services, I’m not going to get a lot of value from an ESB as opposed to using a simpler Web services framework,” Mason said. “Web services frameworks are very good at handling HTTP and SOAP. By putting in an ESB, you’re adding an extra layer of complexity that’s not required for that job.”

Architects and developers using an ESB in these cases are probably engaging in "resume-driven development (RDD)." If anybody asks you if you’ve deployed an ESB in an application you’ve worked on you can say, yes. And then you can hope the hiring manager doesn’t ask if the application really required the technology.

Another mistake, Mason cites, is using an ESB and thinking that you are future-proofing an application that doesn’t need it now, but might someday.

“You’ll Never Need It (YNNI), that acronym has been around awhile for a reason,” Mason says. “That’s another killer problem. If you select an ESB because you think you might need it, you definitely don’t have an architecture that lays out how you’re going to use an ESB because you haven’t given it that much thought. That’s a red flag. You could be bringing in technology just for the sake of it.”

Adding his two-cents to the “Is service-oriented architecture (SOA) dead” debate, the MuleSource CTO says such over-architecting is one of the things that contributes to the problems being encountered by IT in SOA that has given the acronym a bad name. “Architecture is hard enough without adding unnecessary complexity,” he said. “You need to keep it as simple as possible.”

Ironically, adding an ESB because you might need it someday can lead to future problems that might be avoided if you left it out to begin with and then added it in later, Mason said.

“The price of architecting today and re-architecting later is going to be a lot less than architecting badly the first time,” he explained. “If you have a stable architecture, you can augment it later with an ESB, which is going to be easier than trying to plug in an ESB where it’s not going to be needed at that time.”

While the conversation focused on the pitfalls of using an ESB where you don’t need one, the MuleSource CTO naturally believes there are architectures where the ESB makes sense. To begin with, you need to be working on a project where you have three or more applications that need to talk to each other, he explained.

“If you’ve got three applications that have to talk to each other, you’ve actually got six integration points, one for each service, and then it goes up exponentially,” Mason said.

The ESB technology is also needed where the protocols go beyond HTTP. “You should consider an ESB when you start using Java Message Service (JMS), representational state transfer (REST), or any of the other protocols out there,” Mason said. “When communications start getting more complicated is when an ESB shows its true value.”

BriefingsDirect contributor Rich Seeley provided research and editorial assistance on this post. He can be reached at RichSeeley@aol.com.