Virtualization Notebook
On HP's Radar? Shane Robison, HP's chief technology and strategy officer,
was recently interview by Newsweek on his thoughts about the company's overall
technology direction. While there was mention of HP's efforts in datacenter
automation and IT outsourcing, the subject of virtualization didn't come up
-- even in the context of a discussion about green IT. Curious...
A Few Data Points on Virtualization Planning. Cirba's cofounder and
CTO Andrew Hillier recently stopped by our offices to discuss the company's
latest product announcement, version 5.0 of its planning analysis software,
dubbed DCI.
I asked him whether large enterprise customers were doing the planning for
virtualization themselves or hiring systems integrators or consultants to do
it. His view is that there's not one dominant trend, and approaches depend on
which vertical segment you're talking about.
Another interesting data point had to do with Microsoft's future direction
in developing management tools under the System Center VMM banner. He agreed
with our view that Microsoft's features and functionality would have a strong
appeal to the SMB market given certain aspects of price/performance.
Netuitive Warns About Silos. Editor Keith Ward and I spoke recently
with Netuitive Marketing VP Daniel Heimlich about the company's direction in
virtualization. The Virginia-based company has been in the IT management market
since 2002 but specializes in a patented algorithm which "learns"
the best metrics for assessing physical server performance (as opposed to using
preselected and one-size-fits-all metrics) and now does the same for VMs. That's
one ingredient in their secret sauce.
The other (more specifically related to virtualization) is that their solution
can gather data from VMware's
B-hive product, which is more end user and applications-centric and correlate
it with host performance. Interestingly, Heimlich observed that in some IT shops,
there's a trend towards virtualization becoming yet another organizational silo
which, over the long term, can put a dent in the efficiencies that virtualization
promises.
Posted by Tom Valovic on 06/24/2008 at 12:49 PM