The End of my Blog

Well after many months of research and looking throughout the internet for interesting emerging technologies, the blog space now comes to an end for the assessment.

This blog tool has been critical in being able to voice and store ideas about certain key emerging technologies i have found to be very influencial in the longer term for society and businesses.

Light Peak, Silicon Photonics, Virtualisation are all making headways if not now but soon into the future. I look forward to seeing more improvements in these technologies, and what other technologies can be created because of them.

Virtualisation and Cloud

Found an interesting article in regards to cloud computing and virtualisation:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/virtualization/does-virtualization-equal-cloud-computing/1475

I’ve been taking part in an online discussion of virtualization over on LinkedIn. Stowe Spivey, Owner, Intermarket Solutions LLC, posed an interesting question “Is VM here to stay in and of itself or will it morph into, become a part of, the cloud?” That’s an interesting thing to consider.

From my vantage point, virtual machine software, one of five different types of virtualization technology found in the virtual processing layer, one of seven layers of virtualization technology found in my model of virtualization technology, is a useful tool in creating cloud computing environments, but may be used by itself.

Bert Armijo, 3Tera’s SVP Sales and Marketing, added this comment:

Cloud and virtualization are interlinked in much the same way cars and spark plugs are interlinked - they are different layers of a comprehensive service. In the car analogy, what we ultimately want is transportation, and along the way we become consumers of both spark plugs and cars. Some of the technology which provides our transportation we know about as consumers, while others disappear under the hood. This is what’s happening with virtualization and cloud today.

VMs, while actually a very old technology from the mainframe days, have had a major impact on the way we think about and use PC based servers. As a technology, though, virtualization is focused on resource usage, how to leverage excess capacity in servers by running multiple OS instances on the same physical box. (btw - while someone pointed out virtulization isn’t required for cloud, all successful clouds today use virtualization.)

Cloud computing (referring to infrastructure services rather than SaaS) is about more than VMs on-demand; it’s about turning data centers into online services. All the infrastructure components you’d have deployed in a physical data center in the past now have to be exposed programmatically for the cloud to accommodate your applications. Security, storage, networking, life-cycle control, inventory, HA are all required to be part of the cloud. This is obviously quite a different technology space from virtualization.

Cloud computing could not have happened without virtualization as the complexities of trying to expose a traditional data center as an online service are too complex to have ever been reliable. However, as cloud matures, VMs will disappear under the hood.

While interesting, it seems to me that analogy is incomplete. While the spark plug/automobile analogy has some merit, it doesn’t really work with the idea that spark plugs don’t necessarily have to be installed in an automobile. I’ve seen them in chain saws, scooters, motorcycles, ATVs, boats and many other motorized tools and vehicles.

Virtual machine software, in the same fashion, need not be part of a cloud computing environment. Furthermore, cloud computing can be accomplished without a virtual machine in sight.

Some forms of cloud computing, such as infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is likely to often be based upon utilization of virtual machine software. Even this form of cloud computing might be running on a physical machine if the goal is high performance computing or “extreme” transaction processing.

EDS - VMWare Case Studies Success Story

Found a whole bunch of case study success stories for the implementation of VMWare ESX server and this particular one caught my eye as this company is quite big in Australia and manages many big international companies as well.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/customers/apac_au_07Q4_cs_vmw_eds_english.pdf

Basically the company EDS is one of the world’s largest IT services businesses, with a global
client list that includes General Motors, UK Ministry of Defence and Kraft Foods. Australian customers include the Australian Taxation Office, Westpac Banking Corporation, Telstra and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. The company maintains an Australian workforce of more than 6,000 and its portfolio of off erings includes business process outsourcing, information technology outsourcing and application services.

Why this particular case study is so interesting is how they are using server virtualisation to create virtual servers etc for there own customers needs, and on a huge scale with many benefits in cost reduction, speed to market, greenhouse gas emissions reduction etc in a small amount of time.

Desktop virtualisation

Well it seems like desktop virtualisation is becoming the new hottest IT trend at the moment for virtualisation. Basically IT administrators are turning to this technology to help simplify management, improve ROI, accelerate provisioning of new machines, and achieve better security and compliance.

According to an article on ZDNet 19 percent of business are planning at rolling out this technology in the next year or so 2011.

http://whitepapers.zdnet.com/abstract.aspx?docid=2112035&promo=100303

Server virtualisation and the takeup of this technology

Seems like virtualisation especially server virtualisation is really becoming mainstream and pretty much all organisations are looking at implementing some type of virtualisation. Be it in development or full production virtual machines.

Here is an interesting article i found that looks at the stats of virtualisation

• 86 percent of respondents are involved in exploring, testing or usingvirtualization technology.
• The largest portion of respondents (40 percent) will approach server virtualization by implementing a standalone pilot, with success creating the case for the production environment.
• The most important criteria when selecting a server virtualization solution are hardware reduction and infrastructure manageability.
• The two biggest hurdles to overcome when implementing server virtualization are lack of staff expertise and identifying applications that are unaffected by virtualization. This latter hurdle is most problematic to large organizations.
• The top three objectives for implementing virtualization in the production environment are improving disaster recovery, lowering administrative costs and immediate hardware and software savings.

http://www.virtualiqsolutions.com/docs/INS%20WP.pdf

Virtualisation but for mobiles...

Well it seems to be spreading the whole virtualisation bug across all electronic hardware. Virtualisation is already a great tool for PC's and servers, and now it looks like it will extend to the mobile market now.

Found this article about this by Ramana Rolla from doing a search for the future of virtualisation on google news.

http://www.mwd.com/2010/10/virtualization-is-going-to-change-everything-about-a-mobile-performance/

Basically VMware are looking at implementing something similar whereby smartphones can run multiple OSes on the same hardware giving users the ability to have different applications from different platforms on the same phone.

Where will virtualisation end up next... who knows... only time will tell...

World's largest virtual desktop implementation

Found this great article on the world's largest implementation of virtualisation on gizmag.com

http://www.gizmag.com/virtualization-green-computing/11168/

In what's billed as the world’s largest virtual desktop deployment 356,800 virtualized desktops will be supplied to schools across Brazil, bringing computer access to millions. Userful Multiplier

software effectively turns one computer into up to 10 independent PC workstations, reducing CO2 emissions by up to 15 tons per year per system* and electronic waste by up to 80%.

Additional users can work on a single computer by simply attaching extra monitors, mice and keyboards. "This deployment alone saves more than 170,000 tons of CO2 emissions annually, the same as taking 28,000 cars off the road, or planting 41,000 acres of trees”, said Sean Rousseau, Marketing Manager at Userful.

With increasing CO2 emissions, growing evidence about the toxic waste from old electronic goods and more landfill than we can deal with, green computing is a hot topic.

In developing countries virtualization provides huge scope to improve student to computer ratios at a relatively low cost and in a sustainable way. It’s also preferable to us dumping our old environmentally unfriendly computers on these countries as we rush to upgrade or buy the "next big thing".

Userful Multiplier is also a low-cost, energy-saving option for schools, libraries, internet cafes, government, call centers and many other industries, leveraging the unused processing power of computers that sit idle while users check mail, work on documents or surf the web. Each user has access to the full power of the multi-core processor and when more than one user needs the processor at exactly the same time, the computer splits its resources to perform all tasks equally quickly.

According to Userful, all other virtualization solutions lead to sacrifices in performance. Userful offers the features of a full PC including high performance video for less than $50 per additional seat in large deployments (not including monitors and keyboards) and uses standard PC hardware.