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Discussions with Healthcare Industry CTOs

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Yesterday I spent half a day discussing virtualization strategies with a few CTOs from a $15B firm from the healthcare industry.  It was refreshing to see the same glint in the eyes of these CTOs regarding virtualization’s potential to revolutionize their data centers as I saw before joining VMware.  The key aspects of these discussions was how virtualization can help them reduce not only their capex but also their opex.  They also saw the potential that virtualization provides in the areas of increasing their service delivery times (provisioning new systems for customers in 2 hours instead of 2 weeks or 2 months like they are used to) as well as enabeling a new way of thinking about disaster recovery.

Like most IT executives, these CTOs knew about virtualization from the aspect of the hyperadvisor; the core of virtualization that allows you to run multiple operating systems on the same computer at the same time (with each operating system thinking it’s by itself).  This is just the start of the software computer revolution.  Now that you have isolated the OS down to just a bunch of files that can be moved between physical computers transaprently, you have the ability to provision a machine in a short period of time.  Create a base Virtual Machine image for each of your approved OS’.  Next copy that base OS to create another image for each of your general application types.  You now have a library of images that can copied within seconds to an existing physical machine, booted and viola, a provisioned server in minutes; substantially reducing opex.

Also, since the “data” that the enterprise is already backing up for disaster recovery now contains the applications and operating system, DR takes on a whole new meaning.  (and not just DR, but resource “load balancing”, server maintenance, data center migrations…pretty much all the maintenance work that IT has to do.)  You can take your old machines and deploy them to your DR site. Now use your existing data replication software to replicate the VM files.  When your main data center goes down, just turn on your VMs in the DR data center and back to business.  Sure, performance might not be the same, but the business is functioning; the key point of DR.  And since you used hardware that you already own, your capex is reduced.

“Cloud Computing for the Enterprise”.  That is what one of the CTO’s called virtualization.  As someone who has been living in the cloud for years on the Web 2.0, this is not a shocking way for me to think.  Cloud computing was easy for the web, where you had (or could build) apps out of standard web based (REST based) building blocks.  But for an enterprise architect who has to deal with complicated software packages from properitary vendors that process Billions of dollars in orders, this was a refreshing thing to hear.

Could this type of statement indicate that virtualization and utility computing has arrived for the enterprise?

I think that’s a safe statement.

The Dawn of a New Era

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“The Dawn of a New Era”.  That was the slogan that Intel used 30 years ago when they introduced the x86 processor.  And very fitting today for me as I start out a new era in the x86 virtualization space.  Last week I started working at VMware as a Solutions Consultant on the Global Accounts team.  This means that I will be responsible for selling the VMware virtualization solutions to a hand full of very large companies.

While I was talking to VMware about this position, I was impressed with how far they have taken the virtualization technology.  I was one of the 60,000 people who downloaded Workstation 1.0 during the first two months when it was released back in the Spring of 1999.  It was amazing with regards to what it could do back then.  But the magic wore off for me eventually; for most of last year I was using it to run my “work laptop” as a VM on my personal laptop at my previous job (the reason being that my personal laptop was a hell of a lot more powerful than what my employer gave me).  The magic had turned into rock solid technology, it did what it was supposed to and did it well.

But then I started to learn about the management and automation technologies that VMware has built and aquired over the past few years.  With my recent work within software development organizations at Fortune 100 companies, I immediately knew all the benefits to application development teams.   And when I saw a demonstration of Lab Manager, I was in awe once again with the magic.  Being able to run and test a multi-computer software configuration through a web browser and then saving a state of those machines as a bug…that is amazing.  And that is just one of the management/automation tools.

I feel that virtualization currently is and will continue to be the most transforming technology for enterprise computing for the rest of this decade.  That is the reason I decided to join VMware.  So, expect to see more and more postings here in the labs on virtualization moving forward.  Of course, everything I write here will continue to be my own opinion and not that of VMware.

Now, that doesn’t mean that I’m giving up my focus on some of the other technology areas that I have been focusing on lately (i.e., SaaS, Web2.0, Social Computing).  I will still be keeping an eye on many things in those areas and writing about them as time permits.  There are still experiments in the works at the lab…

Virtualization Maybe Key to Apple’s Success with Businesses

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Yesterday I had dinner with a colleague from VMware. During our discussions he made a comment that surprised me and struck a realization for me. He was commenting on how the Macintosh laptops make ideal systems for running virtualization. The reason being that all the hardware on the MacBooks are standardized.

The key to virtualization is the ability to abstract the physical hardware to the operating system. This is the hardest part of any vituralization technology. Not only because of the complexity of that software, but because of the Quality Assurance testing that must be done. Every combination of possible hardware must be tested to ensure reliability. When you think about the combination of hardware possible with PC laptops, the QA test matrix becomes quite large. But, with the Apple laptops, you have a much smaller matrix to test.

We are starting to see serious projects around desktop virtualization (see recent articles How Merrill Lynch Plans To Virtualize Half Its Desktops and Desktop Virtualization Drives Security, Not Just Dollar Savings). When you consider the cost benefits for medium to large enterprises, I think it is clear that we are seeing the start of a wave for desktop virtualization in the IT industry. And that is ontop of just the start of data center virtualization.

Now look at all the variables in PC based business laptops and the complexity of testing all these variations with the virtualization technology, and there is an opening for MacBooks. Of course, this would also require a major change with Apple, they would need to start building an organization that could support enterprises. This means working with them a bit more instead of taking the consumer approach of “here are the options, take it or leave it”.

And then there is Microsoft and their upcoming virtualization technology, don’t expect them to just let such a invasion of MacBooks in the enterprise to happen.