This article was reposted from the “NetworkWorld” website.

VMware’s VMworld has quickly become one of the most important business technology conferences of the year. Held at San Francisco’s Moscone Center Monday through Thursday of this week, the conference had its share of highlights and interesting facts. Here are 10 things seen and heard at VMworld:

The hottest virtualization products at VMworld

1. VMworld drew 17,021 registered attendees, a huge jump over last year’s 12,488. This year’s list of registered attendees includes 4,000 who had never been to VMworld before and 55 who have been to every single VMworld going back to 2004. These 55 dedicated VMworld attendees sat in a special area close to the keynote stage.

2. The show also attracted more than 200 sponsors and exhibitors, including top-tier sponsors Cisco, Dell, EMC and NetApp. There were 170 breakout sessions for attendees looking to learn about virtualization technology (mostly VMware’s).

3. One such session titled “Head-to-Head Comparison: The VMware Advantage Over Microsoft for Building a Private Cloud,” was designed to help customers “make fact-based decisions on where to invest.” The session, led by VMware executives, provided a completely unbiased (wink, wink) comparison of VMware and Microsoft technologies.

4. Microsoft, meanwhile, took out a full-page ad in USA Today pleading with customers not to sign three-year contracts with VMware. VMware CEO Paul Maritz, a former Microsoft Windows executive, called the ad a “sincere form of flattery,” while noting that “For Microsoft to talk about lock-in is a severe case of the pot calling the kettle black.” Microsoft, by the way, has claimed that VMworld rules limit competition, but offered demos of Windows Azure to attendees. (Microsoft vs. VMware: Who’s better at disaster recovery?)

5. The large keynote stage featured some attempts at humor, with VMware CTO Stephen Herrod and other VMware executives using scooters to move from one side of the stage to the other. There was also a video spoofing the Matrix film, complete with the Oracle explaining that the cloud is everywhere and that our minds are simply “dumb terminals.” The video also compared cloud computing to the process of ordering pizza. The bits were well-received by the audience, which seemed to think them funnier than most attempts at vendor comedy.

6. EMC, the owner of VMware, was featured prominently as a sponsor but for the most part EMC’s majority ownership stake in VMware was not discussed. EMC positioned itself as just another VMware partner, albeit a large one, with a sign on the technology exhibition floor that said “EMC: #1 in storage for VMware.”

7. The show floor featured some wackiness, as always. The vendor Kingston Technology hosted Guitar Hero contests; CA’s booth featured women on stilts; and VMware’s giant booth took a page from Apple’s playbook with a “Genius Bar.”

8. The network powering VMworld lab sessions featured a 10 Gigabit core infrastructure; links to Terremark and Verizon facilities in Florida and Virginia; 244TB of useable storage; 352 servers; 736 CPU sockets; and 3,072 CPU cores. Overall, 125,000 virtual machines were expected to be deployed during the conference, to power 12,500 or so labs.

9. 3Par, a storage vendor that is the subject of a billion-dollar bidding war between HP and Dell, had plenty of money to splash around at VMworld. 3Par promoted storage virtualization at its large booth and gave away a 3D television.

10. VMware said it has 190,000 customers, “from AstraZeneca to Zappos,” and noted that 2009 was the first year in which the number of server applications deployed on virtualized infrastructure exceeded the number of applications deployed on physical servers. “There are now more copies of traditional operating systems that no longer see the hardware than those that do,” Maritz said.

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This blog was reposted from the “ZDNet” website

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This article was reposted from the “CIO ComputerWorld” website.

What a difference a year makes. Twelve months ago it was almost impossible to find Australian organisations that had embraced cloud computing. Now pretty much everyone is planning, piloting or executing some form of migration to the cloud. If there was ever doubt that cloud was little more than hype, it was eradicated in April 2010 by Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) group executive for enterprise services and chief information officer, Michael Harte. In a speech to Committee for Economic Development in Australia, Harte declared that never again did he wish to be locked into using proprietary hardware or software and cloud computing was his escape route.

Harte is one of many CIOs who have been able to satisfy concerns that initially arose regarding the data security, accessibility and governance of cloud computing.

The bank has been investigating ways to buy software and infrastructure as a service for several years. A trip to the US in May 2007 included a meeting with Google and a chance to investigate its cloud-based services for messaging and email.

“It freed up so much resource,” Harte says. “And we thought, ‘Wow, wouldn’t it be nice if you could do other enterprise-scale activities on public infrastructure, and you could partition and secure that’.”

At the time, however, there simply wasn’t the business motivation for suppliers to make the switch.

“The incumbent service providers, whether it’s IBM or EDS, were really struggling with the model because they tend towards their own accounting standards,” Harte says. “They still have their own strong business models. They still wanted to continue to ‘lock’. They do resist contestability. And those things are the antithesis of what we were trying to do.”

“We only want to pay for what we use,” Harte says. “We want to get out of infrastructure computing and into fine-grain components and highly granular data, so that our customers enjoy new services. This is not about some technical breakthrough; it is about supplying customers the services they want — and doing that at value.”

An initial area of activity has been in test and development, which Harte says can account for up to 40 per cent of the bank’s server resources. CBA is utilising capacity-on-demand from Savvis and Amazon Web Services for part of the workload.

“Once we’ve developed and tested those capabilities, and we have them operating at full production, we can determine whether they stay outside in the public cloud or [should be] brought back inside the corporation,” Harte says. “We can provision those in under 10 minutes and we can do it at up to a tenth of the cost.”

Harte is not alone in his thinking. For many CIOs, the cloud is a chance to move away from technology strategy and embrace business strategy, although the definitions of cloud computing remain a grey area. Westpac, for example, has completed a trial of an internal private cloud and plans to bring the service into production.

“[We want to] move away from a capital demand-driven budget to one that’s a utility-based model, that is much more predictable and reliable in terms of determining what our ongoing costs will be,” Nikoletatos says. “But this is not about saving money; it is about reducing risk and improving business continuity.”

He says that the experience for students is going to change significantly in the next 10 years, requiring greater flexibility in how data is handled.

“Unless you have a bottomless pit of funding to help build things organically, you have to be thinking differently about how you deliver services,” Nikoletatos says. “It’s about getting the foundation right and, as you mature areas that you can move to the cloud, you slowly progress them and move them once you satisfy the governance-related issues.”

As the deputy chair of the Council of Australian University Directors of IT (CAUDIT), Nikoletatos says many other universities are looking to cloud computing as a way of reducing costs and increasing functionality, including through collaboration. “The University of Melbourne, Monash and RMIT are all working collectively on a model with a Fujitsu data centre in mind,” Nikoletatos says. That large organisations are treating cloud computing seriously reflects the rapid maturity of the capabilities of many service providers. According to the chief technology officer at Melbourne IT, Glenn Gore, much has been learned in a short period.

Melbourne IT has been running VMware’s vCloud Express service since September 2009 and is now switching over to a full vCloud implementation, with vCloud Express to be relaunched as an SME-focused service later this year.

“What I have realised is that some really good things come along with cloud, but with those good things come a different set of responsibilities and accountabilities,” Gore says. “Supporting cloud-like infrastructure is more complex than we anticipated, and that’s even with our decade of hosting experience.”

Melbourne IT is one of several service providers to launch cloud service offerings, and they are finding customers quickly. The earthmoving equipment maker Komatsu, for example, has signed with Telstra to have its IT infrastructure delivered as a service. Komatsu CIO, Ian Harvison, says the decision was catalysed by the expiration of the leases on several of its servers, coupled with the infrastructure in its data centre beginning to show its age. Harvison supports 1200 staff spread across 43 branches around Australia, New Zealand and New Caledonia.

He invited three organisations — Hewlett-Packard, Fujitsu and Telstra — to investigate Komatsu’s requirements and propose a new infrastructure plan. HP withdrew, and the solution that stood up from a cost perspective was Telstra’s. Komatsu has signed a five-year, whole-of-business agreement for Telstra to provide infrastructure-as-a-service in a virtual private cloud, and has also renewed its communications contract with Telstra. “This really is about aligning our resources to focus on the strategic and the core things we need them to do,” Harvison says.

“And in running infrastructure, it’s [Telstra’s] core capability. They can do that — we don’t need to be doing it.”

“It was something we’d wanted to do but the problem in the traditional model is you have to go and buy a server, put it in, and put the whole disaster recovery environment in place,” Harvison says. “This model means we don’t have to worry so much about having to procure the servers ourselves and get them up and running.”

Do it yourself cloud

Komatsu turned to an external provider, but other organisations are choosing to create their own clouds as a more effective way of servicing clients.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) is one example. The constrained resources available to the ABS have meant that it has long operated a chargeback model for its 3200 staff and 1000 field researchers.

But whereas the old model was based on CPU cycles, ABS director of infrastructure, Tony Marion, says that by reorganising its data centre using virtualisation technology, it has been able to configure it as a private cloud and charge clients based on variable overall resources.

“It is a variable charge, but it allows areas that want to do a lot of research and run really long jobs that don’t necessarily need a lot of capability [to not be] charged horrendously per CPU cycle,” Marion says. “So it is more enabler or an ‘evener’ for everybody — all receive an even share of the pie.”

Chargeback is handled through VMware’s Virtual Centre, with the ABS recording the main variables of CPU, memory and disk. Marion says the ABS is now able to provision a test and development environment for its offices almost instantaneously, whereas previously it might have taken two or three months.

Marion is also looking into desktop virtualisation within its cloud to enable staff work from anywhere on any device.

“Everybody has a virtual machine, so that your data never leaves the bounds of ABS,” Marion says. “And if we want to allow people to connect with us from outside, maybe we can set them up with a virtual machine. “These are the sort of things that we are thinking about — giving people more and more capability — because what we want to do is get the statistics out there as easily as possible.”

Similarly, the Catholic Education Network has created its own internal private cloud. CENet services the IT needs of 15 Catholic dioceses encompassing 705 schools across NSW, Queensland and the ACT and Darwin, with a student population of 250,000 and 20,000 teachers.

CENet chief executive officer, Bede Ritchie, explains that when faced with the need to refresh its server environment, the network opted in January 2010 to virtualise using technology from NetApp and VMware, giving it the basis of a private cloud. The initiative has also taken advantage of the Catholic Network Australia program that has improved the bandwidth to the majority of schools across the country. The new configuration enables CENet to offer infrastructure-as-a-service to the dioceses to run their own discrete services.

“The big benefit from my perspective is taking away the responsibility for them to have to worry about hardware,” Ritchie says. “A diocese can request a VM, request some storage, run it up, and three months later just make it disappear and go back in the pool again.

“They can be freed to use their smarts to assist teachers to implement ICT in classrooms, rather than having to kick tin.”

The business case

The reasons for adopting could services are often very specific. For the property company Savills, it was about commoditising certain backend functions, particularly disaster recovery.

Infrastructure manager, Justin Gillfeather, says Savills is trialling Optus’ cloud service. By connecting across the Optus network he does not have to risk reaching out to public services.

“We expect it will take some load off our internal IT department,” Gillfeather says. “Especially things like disaster recovery — that all becomes somebody else’s problem.

“The reason we are in beta is to find out whether it is going to be cost effective for us to do this, whether it is really going to save us as much money as we thought, and the degree of flexibility it will really give us.”

Gillfeather says Savills is currently geared towards acquiring other businesses, which means potentially needing resources at short notice.

“If we had cloud running we might be able to do that far more easily than we are currently able to,” Gillfeather says. “If we can buy those resources from somebody else and know upfront how much it is going to cost, that allows us to do longer-term planning that we are otherwise able to.

“If we were starting a brand new business tomorrow would I buy any server hardware at all? At the moment I would, but two or three years from now, maybe not.”

Australian surfwear retailer City Beach certainly isn’t keen to spend the money to find out. When it came to upgrading from a static Web page to a full e-commerce service based on WebSphere Commerce, it opted to host it on Brennan IT’s infrastructure-as-a-service platform. City Beach is Australia’s largest independent retailer of surf, skate and urban wear, with 60 stores nationwide and a turnover of about $300 million. CIO, Paul Downs, says that hosting with Brennan was more cost effective than what he could achieve himself, and it enabled the company to deploy its site in less than 100 days in the lead-up to a Christmas deadline.

“I have quite a lean-team here, so my strategy is to outsource as much as possible, because we just don’t have the resources to provide 24 by 7 monitoring and break-fix,” Downs says. “When you stack up the cost of the wrap-around services versus the cost if I had to employ two or three people to provide the coverage over a year, it’s significantly cheaper, and Brennan places an SLA around it.”

Reality check

The enthusiasm with which many CIOs are embracing cloud computing in no way detracts from satisfying their concerns around data security, accessibility and governance.

According to CBA’s Harte, these issues are not all settled all at once, but they are not all necessarily new, either. Security, for example, has been a concern with each new IT delivery model, including outsourcing, offshoring and virtualisation.

“Security is definitely a concern, but wherever there is a large arbitrage to be had people will decide whether or not they are going to have it,” Harte says. “If they need further compliance, you can work with regulators and the risk community to figure out what to build back to ensure that robust security.”

Komatsu’s Harvison says it is important that CIOs investigate these models now to meet the agenda being placed upon them to do more with less, because hands-on experience is the only way to answer these concerns.

“The technology now is there, it’s proven,” Harvison says. “And as long as you have some comfort around the security aspects and the partner you’ve chosen, then I don’t think there’s reasons to put it up as a barrier anymore.”

Read what the survey revealed

“With VMworld 2010 coming (my goodness, I have 4 sessions, 3 of which are repeated – gasp.   So.  Much.  Work. To.  Do!), I wanted to ask my readers what’s on their minds VMware-related.   It’s always good to know.  I talk to customers every day, but rarely do much analysis of anecdotal stuff I observe.

So – would love to hear from you!   I’ve made a quick little survey.   You’d be surprised how far reaching the last one went within EMC and VMware – so it’s a good chance to have your voice heard.

• What’s your IT infrastructure look like?
• What do you like about it?
• What frustrates you about it?
• What do you think we should be doing that we’re not (EMC, VMware, or heck, the whole IT industry)?
• What are YOU doing that’s cool?

Would really love to hear about you – if you’re interested in sharing, please read on…

Ok – this is a short, 5 minute survey.   As always, anonymous, and what you say will be heard – a good choice to stand on that soapbox!”

– Chad Sakac, Vice President, VMware Technology Alliance, EMC Corporation

Take the survey

This article was reposted from the “Enterprise Storage Forum.com” website

Two years ago, at the EMC Forum in Long Beach, Calif., the worlds of storage networking and VMware seemed a galaxy apart. The VMware guys huddled in distinct groups, had their own session track that had little to do with data storage, and spoke in a language that few in the larger storage camp could understand.

At this year’s event (last week in Long Beach), all that changed. Not only were the VMware tracks more aligned via EMC’s (NYSE: EMC) journey to the private cloud messaging, but the storage guys were now talking the same lingo. It seems that EMC has embraced the language of virtualization across its culture – vSphere, vCenter, VCB, (VMware Consolidated Backup) and all the rest of the virtual-speak were part and parcel of EMC’s own technical presentations about backup, Symmetrix and storage management.

EMC Forum also featured news of the imminent release of Unisphere for unified array management, the vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) as detailed in a recent Enterprise Storage Forum article, and a briefing on vBlock, the first tangible product from the EMC, Cisco and VMware partnership.

“The new vSphere APIs provide the best virtual server integration,” said Pat Gelsinger, the company’s president and COO.

Method to the Madness

During the EMC World event in May, Gelsinger seemed like a square peg in a round hole. Clearly not a storage networking guy, his presentation appeared to be a little offbeat. At EMC Forum, however, he was the main event and his mission came more sharply into focus.

While continuing the private cloud theme, he went into the specifics of where EMC is heading, such as streamlining the product portfolio from end-to-end.

“EMC had a very complex product line when I showed up,” said Gelsinger. “We are in the midst of simplifying it.”

He cited several examples. One goal is to bring block, file and object-based storage together in the long term. He also mentioned that instead of 16 ways to accomplish replication, EMC would boil it down to one or two. Rumors of the unification of EMC arrays, then, could prove well founded.

Probably the most tangible sign of EMC’s intentions is the release of the Unisphere unified management console. It works across CLARiiON and Celerra systems and will be part of new arrays and systems going forward. What this does is provide one pane of glass to manage storage – no more jumping from console to console depending on the product line.

Interestingly, the dovetailing with VMware is so tight that users can use either Unisphere or vSphere for management purposes (i.e. virtualization and server guys can stay within vSphere and yet find out anything they need to know about storage). Similarly, storage administrators can use Unisphere as a window into the wider world of servers and virtual machines (VM).

Gelsinger was bullish about the acquisition of Greenplum, which he described as a provider of disruptive data warehousing tech and as the best-in-class large scale environment for large amounts of data. EMC has big plans for Greenplum’s massively parallel architecture, which takes advantage of scale-out virtual x86 servers.

It is easy to see how this complements the vision of the private cloud. The plan is to base a new data computing product division around Greenplum within EMC’s Information Infrastructure business.

“Greenplum is available currently as software, but appliance versions will be coming out,” said Gelsinger.

There are many pieces involved in the EMC cloud jigsaw. Without giving much away, Gelsinger hinted that EMC Atmos would be the product line to deliver object-based storage for the cloud as part of an ongoing IT-as-a-Service vision incorporating SLA-driven management.

“New products dealing with IT-as-a-service are scheduled for the second part of this year,” said Gelsinger. “We are also revitalizing our relationship with Dell.”

That last tidbit no doubt is a partnership to provide cheap server building blocks for the cloud.

EMCware

The extent of integration between EMC and VMware became crystal clear during the first technical session of the day – delivered by Frank Divona, business manager for EMC’s Unified Storage, Cloud Computing and Archive platforms. He discussed VAAI and what it means for Unisphere: it opens the door to a common suite of data services for deduplication, compression, virtual provisioning, compliance, tiering and replication regardless of the drive type or type of storage (file, block or object).

“You can compress specific VMs, or shift around your storage environment from within vSphere,” said Divona. “You can create a data store and provision it in a couple of clicks. Everything else is done automatically.”

He added that VAAI produces 10x less IO for common tasks like creating VMs, makes it possible to house10x more VMs per data store and enables 10x faster VM deployment.

“As you create more VMs, you experience problems via locking which limits the number of VMs you can create,” said Divona. “VAAI handles this.”

The way EMC has designed it, however, you can manage all of this via vSphere or Unisphere. Divona said the latter would be available by the end of the month, which would give a common experience of SAN and NAS for the mid-tier space.

“There are a lot more Unisphere features coming in the third quarter for even more integrated management,” he said. “The overall direction is to make it so you are managing apps and have the storage automatically provisioned as opposed to having to build the storage and then trying to cobble it to the applications manually.”

Head in the Clouds

Far from merely talking the talk, EMC has put its head firmly into the cloud in the form of its own data centers. Senior director of EMC IT, Michael Montoya, is the point man on EMC’s very own personal journey to the private cloud. This initiative encompasses close to 50,000 internal users as well as 400,000 customers and partners, five physical data centers, 7PB of storage, and more than 400 applications and tools.

Currently, the company is about 55 percent virtualized. As it has done so, it has engaged in massive amounts of server consolidation; one project squeezed 1670 servers down to 310; a second brought another 1600 servers down to 40.

“We are experiencing 60 percent more storage growth but not getting 60 percent more funding,” said Montoya. “Driving efficiencies via virtualization and the cloud is a vital action.”

Tangible gains to date include maintaining a flat storage headcount despite the data explosion, as well as cutting down on the amount of storage required. Montoya estimates having avoided the acquisition of 1PB of storage over the last five years or so. Cash savings are estimated at around $105 million.

The goal is to be 100 percent virtualized on vSphere while delivering cloud-based services like self-service provisioning to users. In the meantime, the company has moved from two data storage tiers to five with Flash making up the first tier for highest performance.

500 users have been migrated to virtual desktops using VMware View 4.0, RSA Security and vBlock. By 2012, the whole company will be operating on virtual desktops. Clearly, this is a big step on the road towards the cloud, as is the recent deployment of Salesforce.com for CRM.

Such large scale overhauls, though, do not happen in isolation. Far from being the secret scheming of the few in IT, Montoya acknowledges the vital role of business-IT alignment. As part of that, IT has to have top-level support to be able to pull off such changes.

“We are in the board room more than ever,” he said. “We have become involved in more strategic discussions as we have complete executive buy in.”