This is a great strategy for VMware.  I’m assuming VMware is trying to position Virtual Center as the one and only Virtual Management Application that customers will need.  By allowing ISV’s (Independent Software Vendors) to easily and seamlessly integrate with Virtual Center then customers can potentially get the functionality not directly provided by Virtual Center from ISVs while still using Virtual Center as the "single pane of glass".

The VMware team did a nice job of implementing the VIC.  If you are interested in implementing a Virtual Infrastructure Client yourself there is a VIC communities page on the VMware website that contains an SDK and some useful technical notes.  The website currently states that the SDK is "experimental" but so far we haven’t experience any major problems.

So in a nutshell here’s how it all works:

The only problem we ran into was with setting the ExtensionClientInfo and ExtensionServerInfo type.  The type must be set to com.vmware.vim.viClientScripts.  That wasn’t clear in the version of the documentation that we originally designed from.  It looks like VMware has since updated the technical note making that clear.

Please contact Akorri if you’d like to try our BalancePoint VIC yourself. 

The big buzz at the show this year evolved around storage.  VMware and it’s customers have all realized how important a role storage plays in the successful deployment of virtualization in the data center.  If your storage subsystems aren’t configured properly and performing at the right levels then your entire virtual infrastructure is impacted.  As I’ve stated for the past few years you can’t only focus on one component of the infrastructure but need a complete "cross-domain" view of your virtual system.

Another hot topic were "Clouds".  Clearly in it’s infancy Cloud Computing is gaining a lot of attention these days.  Most customers and partners I talked with are still trying to figure out how clouds impact them and how they can advantage of it.  I think you’ll see a lot of adoption of "private clouds" over the next year.  This is the logical next step and get’s IT closer to were it ultimately must go anyway which is to a services based architecture.

Akorri generated a lot of buzz with it’s announcement of a reseller deal with Dell and demonstrated it’s support for Dell’s Equallogic storage array.  We also demonstrated an integration of BalancePoint into VMware’s Virtual Center and with Quest Software’s Foglight product.  Over the next week I’ll write a more detailed blog about each of these items.

For now I’m looking forward to a good nights sleep and trying to decide how to spend that $7!

vStorage understands the services that exist in the storage layer and will utilize those services when they make sense.  For example, if a user wants to move a large VMDK from one storage pool to another then vStorage will kick off the migration using storage array migration services instead of having the server actually perform the migration.  This is significantly improve the performance of the system by cutting migration times by an order of magnitude.

This reminds me of all the buzz around "Serverless Backup" that the SAN switch guys use to talk about in the late 90’s.  Anytime you can get services enabled that are actually closer to the data the better. 

My understanding is that vStorage is 6-18 months out.  I’ll be keeping any eye on this and keep you updated as more information rolls out.

If you are here please stop by booth 1314 to see the latest version of Akorri’s BalancePoint in action. 

This article is a review of 14 SSD drives.  It gives you a good overview of who the vendors are and what they have for offerings.  I think when you start to see roundups like this you can believe the technology is real and that it is beginning to commoditize.  I hope you find the article useful. 

How do I know that?  Well I haven’t seen any analysts studies on the subject but looking at our customer base and potential customers that I’ve had the pleasure to speak with I think I can firmly state that the most popular storage arrays deployed into virtual environments today are EMC CLARiiON, Dell Equallogic, NetApp FAS, and HP EVA.

These storage arrays all offer something very attractive to IT administrators who are deploying their virtual infrastructure…they are rock solid, well proven, good performing, cost effective arrays.

I’m looking forward to growing our Equallogic customer base.  By utilizing our Analytics and Modeling capability Equallogic customers will be assured that they are getting the most out of their investment.

In a previous posting I mentioned that one of the technologies that is changing the storage industry is Solid State Drives (SSD’s).  Back in January EMC announced that all of it’s core products will now be offered with SSD’s.  We’re also beginning to see startups like Pilant Technologies sprout up that are focusing solely on this space.  These events really mark the beginning of the end for spinning media.  SSD’s have been talked about for many, many years but the technology is finally at a point to make the technology viable for this applications.

SSD’s today are made from FLASH memory devices.  FLASH technology is what you find in digital camera’s, some MP3 players, and USB memory sticks.  Over the past decade or so FLASH memory has proven itself as a reliable and rugged technology.  Although FLASH devices haven’t hit the cost/MB that spinning media has there are other industry trends that are driving the adoption of SSD’s.

FLASH based SSD’s provide four key attributes that are attractive to storage vendors these days.  First and foremost the densities are approaching parity, although spinning media still has a slight edge.  Second is power.  SSD’s offer a significant savings in power consumption.  These days anything "green" seems to be able to sell and SSD’s have a strong lead over spinning media on this front.  Another important metric is performance.  SSD’s are inherently faster than their spinning media counterparts.  One reason is that with SSD’s there is no rotational latency, the proper devices are addressed directly.  The last major factor is reliability.  SSD’s have much longer Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF’s) than spinning drives do.  Mechanical parts are prone to higher failure rates than their solid state counterparts.

What we are seeing today is that Storage Array vendors are swapping their spinning drives for SSD’s.  They have fabricated SSD’s to fit the same footprint as the traditional spinning disk drive.  I guess one benefit of this approach is that customers now have a choice and they can decide whether to use spinning media in one tier of storage while using Solid State Drives in other tiers to improve performance and reliability.

As long as the Array vendors don’t unduly influence the purchasing decisions of customers I think you’ll see a large number of customers opt for the SSD technology.  Why wouldn’t they?  And once that really begins to take hold I bet you’ll see some innovative "redesign" of the Storage Array.

I wonder if this transition will be the death to the traditional storage protocols like SCSI.  Wouldn’t RDMA technologies such as iWarp make more sense?  I think the SSD revolution will have a much greater impact on the storage industry than any other previous transition.  I’m looking forward to be part of the evolution of the storage array over the next decade….it’s going to be an exciting ride!

B-Hive’s Conductor product monitors network traffic and uses that information to map applications to the supporting infrastructure and reports on measured response times of the monitored transactions.  This gives a good view of how well your service is performing.  However Conductor does not have visibility into the SAN and storage layers and can’t help you monitor, troubleshoot, optimize, and plan those pieces of the infrastructure.

I would think the next step for VMware would be to make the information from the B-Hive product accessible via Virtual Center.  Products such as BalancePoint will benefit from that web and application centric analysis and complimenting that with the analysis and modeling that we do will give the customer a complete end-to-end view of their IT service.

I’ll be at the Citrix Synergy Show in Houston.  Our booth number is 423.  If you are going to be there please stop by and see our product in action.  Tom Joyce will be representing us at EMC World in Las Vegas.  Our booth number there is 108.  If you are there please stop in and say hello.

Until recently though this vision was impossible to implement.  The Data Center was a fairly static place where modifying resources to support business applications took hours if not days to accomplish.  Providing true service levels was impossible, IT managers didn’t even know how to define a service level let alone implement one. 

The adoption of virtualization technology changes that though.  Compute, network, and storage resources all become very dynamic and modifications to these resources can happen in real time or near real time instead of the hours and days it would take in the past.

Two other key pieces of technology have evolved that will make the transformation of the Data Center complete.  One key technology is autonomic elements.  In order to provide true "lights out" operation elements within the Data Center need the capability to "self heal" and automatically provision based on changing requirements.  Recently Xiotech announced their ISE line of storage arrays.  This storage array has the capability to predict when drives are becoming problematic and re-calibrates the drives before issues arise.  It also has the capability to self heal using it’s "Spare-In-Place" technology.  This is the first autonomic storage array I’ve come across and I’m sure you’ll see more vendors going down this path in the future.  Of course this technology will become easier to implement as we adopt SSD’s (Solid State Disk) and obsolete the spinning rust we deal with today.  I’ll talk more about that in a future post.

The last piece of technology that is needed in order to realize this Future Data is what my friends, Ellen & Richie Lary, calls the DCRM or Data Center Resource Manager.  They describe the DCRM as

performs several important policy-based functions, utilizing the various system management utilities available in the data center as its eyes and hands.  The DCRM maintains knowledge of what resources are available to allocate to applications, and schedules an application for execution based on priority and the availability of appropriate resources.

Beyond providing policy-based functions I believe the DCRM needs to also offer a rich set of Analytical and Modeling capability in order to truly manage the Future Data Center.  A policy engine alone can not provide the dynamic, system level knowledge that the DCRM requires to make it’s decisions about which resources to deploy and when to deploy them.  Another aspect of the DCRM is that it needs to not only respond to current conditions but also must have predictive capabilities.  In this new paradigm IT service providers have to have an insight into the future needs of the business.

Akorri’s BalancePoint is a good example of a DCRM.  BalancePoint provides the necessary visibility across all layers of virtualization and with a rich set of analytics and modeling is able to identify trouble spots and make recommendations about future service capabilities. 

All three technologies, virtualization, autonomic elements, and DCRM can now be combined to offer a true Future Data Center.  My prediction is that you’ll see the first "service based" data centers rolled out in the very near future and then the real excitement begins.