What a Month
Wow, I cant believe its been a month since my last posting. What a month its been. Startups are intense places and Akorri is no exception. Since our company & product launch on January 15th Ive been on a whirlwind tour of customer and partner visits and conferences.
On March 2nd I was asked to speak at the New York CMG. For those of you not familiar with Computer Measurement Group (CMG), its a group of professionals who are interested in performance measurement and analysis of computer systems. CMG is a great resource if you are interested in computer systems performance and Id highly recommend joining.
The NY CMG chapter meeting on was focused on virtualization. Virtualization is a hot topic these days and its impact on system performance is a difficult one to understand. My talk focused on a few key points.
The first point I made was that virtualization is not new. Networks have been virtualized for years. You could also consider things like server based volume managers as a virtualization layer. And lets face it, most storage vendors have had some type of virtual LUN for years. Its server based virtualization like VMWare and Xen that are causing all the hype these days.
The second point I made was that what virtualization does for an IT organization is that it turns physical resources into services. VMWare for example turns computes into a service. If an application needs more computes then we turn a dial in the server virtualization layer and get more. If a storage volume needs more space or different protection characteristics we can turn a dial in the storage virtualization layer to achieve this goal. This is a very powerful realization. But as you can imagine, it also has a huge impact on effective system management and overall system performance.
My third point was that in order to achieve effective management of a virtualized IT infrastructure, a new management paradigm needs to be embraced. Virtualization can provide for highly dynamic systems, systems that can change relatively easy with changes in business requirements or workload. But in order to realize the benefits of this dynamic system, a high degree of collaboration between various organizations within the enterprise needs to exist. The business owner, application administrator, server administrator, network administrator and storage administrator all need to be in sync as to defining the requirements and how those requirements will impact their areas of focus.
In a future post Ill talk in more detail regarding how I believe that the available collaboration tools known as Web 2.0 can be used in achieving effective IT management in our virtualized world.
