Monthly Archive for April, 2008

IDC Virtualization Forum West - Part 2

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on April 8, 2008
in Open Source, Software, Technology and Virtualization
. 0 Comments

At the IDC Virtualization Forum West Conference, John Humphreys, Program Vice President of the Enterprise Platform Group at IDC shared some more detailed thoughts on the virtualization markets (great presentation, BTW).

Further takeaways include:

  • Of the customers that are doing virtualization in their data centers today, IDC says that 22% of servers have already been virtualized, with an expected rise to 45% in 12 months. Note that Gartner claims that the overall virtualized server market share is 5%. Which means, to me, that there is a whole lot of headroom for virtualized server growth.
  • Power & Cooling account for $0.50 for every $1 spent on servers, or about $29 Billion annually.
  • Roughly $8 in maintenance spent for every $1 in new infrastructure.
  • "Server consolidation" is already appearing to be "old news". Now "Desktop Consolidation" is hot - the ability to serve up the desktop client image from a central location, and all the centralized admin goodness that comes from that. IDC notes a number of challenges, like the fact that moving the desktop client images into the data center results in 20-30% cost of storage increase (I would think it would be much more, personally), due to the additional network storage requirements; There are still challenges with running the virtualized OS legally (if you are not already a Software Assurance volume pricing customer, that is; who wants to buy another retail copy of Windows just to serve it up from the central data center?); And, performance of the remote desktop protocols can be poor for some client workloads. IDC specifically mentioned Qumranet and their SPICE remote connection protocol as potentially addressing some of these performance issue.
  • Virtualization appears to be solving the complexity problems that surround the deployment of "clusters" in the data center. And, I completely agree. I’ve set up many, and they are way too complicated. And virtualizing is way too easy. Death to clusters!

My thought on the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure topic: Today’s desktop computers are extremely powerful and should not be used as dumb terminals that just do "Remote Desktop" access. You need to find a hybrid approach that allows you to use the power of the desktop client (and all that lovely disk drive space on the client). Once clients start being delivered with a built-in hypervisor (which is not too far away), you could argue that you might be able to treat the client as a server. Then, there is just the matter of managing the Virtual Hard Disk images. Using a CacheFS would be one very easy way to do so (transparent local storage that can be taken offline with automatic server-based backing I/O).

The Citrix folks have an interesting approach to this, including both the ability to "stream" an application load to a diskful and stateful Windows client, OR to deliver a server-hosted virtual machine through a remote protocol connection. Choice. Choice is good, as one size will not fit all customer environments for client desktop management. Check out the Citrix Delivery Center.



IDC Virtualization Forum West - Eastwood Keynote

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on April 8, 2008
in Software, Technology and Virtualization
. 0 Comments

I attended the IDC Virtualization Forum West 2008 conference today. It was kicked off by Matthew Eastwood of IDC. He shared some of the IDC analysis of the virtualization markets.

Some takeaways that I found interesting:

  • Worldwide IT Spending on Servers + Power + Cooling currently at about $55 Billion annually.
  • Data centers continue to grow with new server purchases annually (and relatively fewer servers retired annually, so absolute growth appears to never end).
  • Server Management & Admin costs are rising at 4x the rate of new server acquisition growth, while Power & Cooling is growing at 8x the rate.
  • Number of Rack “U” used annually increases 25x to 15.4 Million servers - this is 365,000 racks representing $15 Billion, with an additional $30 Billion going to Power & Cooling requirements.
  • IDC conducted a survey where they asked IT customers about their interest in “Green Data Centers”. Result, with n=191, was that 37% would Favor A Green Supplier, 51% thought Green would Help With Compliance, and 81% felt that Green Strategies would help to reduce OPEX.

So, lots of discussion about the need for Green data centers, and the huge amount of Power and Cooling costs that directly affect operating expense. A dynamic and adaptable data center can provide for a green data center - one that can power servers down when they are not needed, performing dynamic server consolidation based on business process needs. In fact, that’s what Cassatt’s Active Power Management and Active Response products do.

Go save the planet. Or, at least increase your corporation’s earnings. That’s important too.

Disclosure: I am a Founder and shareholder of Cassatt.

At IDC Virtualization Forum West Conference

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on April 7, 2008
in Software, Startups, Technology and Virtualization
. 0 Comments

image I will be attending the IDC Virtualization Forum West conference tomorrow.

Many thanks to Simon Crosby (formerly of XenSource, now with Citrix) for the invitation.

If you will also be there and would like to chat, please drop me a line.

I’ll follow-up here with some of the interesting takeaways.

Some Nice Scalr Follow-Ups

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on April 3, 2008
in Open Source, Software and Technology
. 0 Comments

Just ran across a couple of good follow-ups to my article on Scalr: One done by the awesome Amazon Web Services team, and the other done by the kick-ass team at TechCrunch. Glad to see the Scalr project getting some good coverage. Let’s rally around this and make it great!

SugarSync Responds To Negative Pricing Coverage

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on April 3, 2008
in Mobile, Software, Startups and Technology
. 2 Comments

In my article about Sharpcast and their recently released SugarSync product, one of my key criticisms was the fact that the service was priced too high. It appears that I was not alone. Sharpcast has cut their prices in half in response. From their Pricing page:

Looking for the Founders’ Circle (50% off) pricing information? As of April 1, 2008, the Founders’ Circle promotional pricing is our new ongoing, everyday low price, as reflected below. We have listened to your feedback and are excited to offer you the best value possible.

imageSharpcast apparently rolled out the price cut quietly. I would not have known about it had I not read a review by Walt Mossberg (cross-referenced here) which stated the lower price point. I was sure that Walt had it wrong. But, he did not. The price for the service has dropped.

Good for them.

I think they should continue to listen to their "customers". Of course, it seems odd that they would not have known that they were too pricey the week before when they launched. Oh well. Better late than never.

The other thing that surprised me from  Walt’s review was that the much-touted SugarSync Mobile client actually doesn’t sync modified documents:

The cellphone versions can only view photos and whatever documents the phones allow, but changes you make on the phones in documents other than photos aren’t synced back to the computers or to the Web site.

In addition, SugarSync can’t synchronize Microsoft Outlook files and it can’t, say, replicate a new calendar entry or contact change across your computers.

I get that it doesn’t handle contacts and calendar information. It just deals with files. But, customers certainly would be interested in having a single "sync" solution for their entire mobile device that works Over The Air. But my guess is that this would be too de-focusing for SugarSync at this time.

My Maxtor Hard Disk Clunks To Death

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on April 3, 2008
in Mac OS X and Technology
. 0 Comments

imageWhen your disk drive starts making loud, squealing noises when you first turn it on… That’s a sign.

When your disk drive starts making clicking noises as if it were a metronome… That’s a sign.

When your disk drive starts throwing I/O Errors to the console… That’s a sign.

When your disk drive no longer mounts its volume… That’s a sign.

Yeah - A sign that your disk is about to die or is already dead.

That’s what happened to my Time Machine disk that is attached to my Apple iMac desktop computer. It was a 750GB Maxtor One Touch III, purchased just 7 months ago.

The Good News is that it was just my backup drive and not my primary drive. My primary drive is a 1TB disk, as shipped by Apple, and thankfully has hummed along perfectly. So, I could keep working.

The Bad News is that you are no longer making hourly backups, and all of your Time Machine backups are no longer available, so you are completely exposed. I.e., I need a Time Machine backup disk for my Time Machine disk! Or, multiple Time Machine volumes (if that’s possible?)…

So, I surf over to the Seagate/Maxtor site and check the warranty coverage. The disk has a 1-year warranty, so I’m good since I bought it about 7 months ago. The warranty process is very streamlined at Maxtor - completely hands-off and web-based. I was given the choice of paying $20 for expedited replacement (two-day shipping), or a free replacement that could take a couple of weeks (I would have to send in my disk first, then get one back through slow mail).

I like my backups, so I chose the $20 option, and the disk arrived 3 days later (submitted the form on Sunday night, it was processed and shipped on Monday, and arrived on Wednesday).

It took all night (about 10 hours) to re-sync my Time Machine backups. About 1,256,435 files in 600GB of data. I was quite surprised to see that I’ve got over a million files… Hmm.

Ah, I feel safe again.

Zoto Open Sources Their Web Site Code - Maybe

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on April 2, 2008
in Open Source, Software and Startups
. 0 Comments

image The folks over at the photo sharing site Zoto have decided to Open Source the code for their site. Kord Campbell, CEO of Zoto and currently Chief Evangelist at Splunk, makes the announcement at GeekCEO:

I’ll keep this simple. I’m uploading the Zoto 3.0 source code to its new Google Code project tonight, and placing the BSD free software license on it. Version 2.0 of Zoto will follow in a couple of days (as soon as I find where we put it). We’ve also been working on a new site called Fotofluff, and its code is going up there as well.

This is a very cool development, and very cool of the Zoto folks to do. Hundreds of files filled with Python goodness representing a very well done photo sharing site. Nice.

However, while Kord claims that the code will be released under a BSD license, and the Google Code page specifically references the New BSD License, the About page on Google Code says:


The server and the rest of the Zoto code base is now free for non-commercial use. If you want to use Zoto’s software in a commercial, for-profit environment, you can contact Kord Campbell at kordless@gmail.com, to inquire about licensing options for commercial applications.

That’s not exactly a BSD license.

And, when you download the code using: "svn checkout http://zoto-server.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ zoto-server", there is no LICENSE file included in the distribution to clarify. Interestingly, someone even filed a bug/issue against the project about this.

The BSD License would certainly allow for the greatest re-use of the existing code and is a good choice to use, depending on what Kord’s goals are.

I look forward to the clarification of the license.

Herb Savor Is A Cool Tool

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on April 2, 2008
in Cooking, Gadgets and Personal
. 0 Comments

I agree completely with this article from the folks a Cool Tools.

This thing actually works.

We do have a herb garden, which works so much better than buying herbs at the grocery store for $1.69 a throw. However, when the herbs are not growing, we’re using this thing to eek out a little more life.

This was a wedding gift for us, not on our registry, that really surprised us with its utility. Highly recommended.

Y Combinator + RescueTime: Lessons Learned

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on April 2, 2008
in Software, Startups and Venture Capital
. 0 Comments

image Tony Wright wrote a nice article over at FoundRead about his experience with the folks at Y Combinator in getting his most recent company, RescueTime, to market. Definitely worth a read.

I like the Y Combinator model that Paul Graham has put together. And, they’re getting lots of great companies built (on the cheap, as it should be).