Looking for the heart to proceed with your stumbling virtualization plans? The brains to figure out how to deal with unchecked proliferation? The courage to tell your C-levels that no, Amazon E3 isn’t the answer to all of life’s problems?

Then Interop was the right place to be this week, as vendors pitched their roadmaps and panelists promised access to a sane (or at least saner) way to transition from your current server architecture to a more scalable, agile, cloud-like infrastructure without the security risks or loss of control.

And while the focus was on achieving the benefits of the cloud, the strategies presented were often grounded in virtualization fundamentals, paving a more organic path on the way to the fabled Oz of IT.

Acknowledging Shortcomings

The quest for cloudiness begins, in large part, because of virtualization’s limitations, at least as it is largely implemented. Server virtualization was an early no-brainer due to the ability to drastically save on CapEx spending: Instead of buying 3 servers, which each used about 50% of their load at any given time, you could buy 2, and distribute one of those servers, virtualized, to whichever physical machine was under the least load at the time.

Or better yet, stuff 50 servers on one high device and save on not only server costs, but also server room space, power, cooling … The savings were immediate and tangible.

But the time spent managing these devices didn’t decrease alongside the original savings, and so while there were some ongoing savings (reduced cooling and power, for example), virtualization stalled out as far as the benefits it could offer, particularly since a virtualized environment offered a host of new challenges that IT hadn’t run into before, including the difficulty of troubleshooting a server when you might not even know where it is physically, or how to check and monitor machine-to-machine traffic effectively and efficiently.

“We were wildly successful, and we didn’t figure out all these problems,” said Jerry McCloud, director of marketing at VMware. ”We [now] see all the issues, we know all the issues, and quite frankly, we have all the issues.”

Click your heels three times

Fortunately, even as virtualization was finding wide acceptance, top minds were working on ensuring that the new tools didn’t just pile new problems on top of the old ones.

Andi Mann, VP of marketing with CA and author of Visible Ops Private Cloud, said that companies need to work to evolve their virtualization activities along a sensible path.

1. Consolidation: The first stage of a virtualization strategy, in which hardware is consolidated using basic virtualization technologies. This is where you see the CapEx gains mentioned earlier.

2. Optimization: Start using infrastructure automation tools to ensure that the system self-tunes itself from time to time, ensuring best practices and sensible deployments throughout your virtualized infrastructure without manual intervention.

3. Orchestration: A deeper automation of a wider variety of tasks, including the ramp up of new services and servers. This is where business agility benefits begin to kick in, reducing deployment times and cost while reducing human error.

4. Dynamic IT: Welcome to Oz, where new services are up and running in days and where IT can sit contentedly back, watching the glorious green uptime fruits of its labors.

Does this virtualization road map make sense to you? Do you see your virtualized efforts becoming more cloud-like, on purpose or through coincidence? Is this just more marketing buzzwork as entrenched players push back against the likes of Amazon? We’d love to hear your take, below in the comments or directly to me via e-mail.

Michael Morisy is the editorial director for ITKnowledgeExchange. He can be followed on Twitter or you can reach him at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/fEss8VLqVXM" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Michael Kerner’s take sums up what a lot of people were thinking: Juniper’s suffered a serious blow, and Cisco’s likely to be able to take his knowledge and rapidly iterate their own answer to QFabric. Shamus McGillicuddy at SearchNetworking got a more nuanced view from Tom Nolle:

Still, some analysts believe Yen’s departure is more of a gain for Cisco than a loss for Juniper.

“I know and respect David, but Pradeep [Sindu, Juniper CTO] has had the guiding role in Juniper’s activities, especially QFabric,” said Tom Nolle, president of research firm CIMI Corporation. “The underlying semiconductor chipset has long been completed and there is not likely going to be an interruption on the QFabric release.”

For Cisco, however, Yen’s deep technology background sends an important message that the company will better focus on tech strategy.

It’s unlikely Yen will bring any Juniper trade secrets Cisco’s way – even if Cisco’s architecture could support whatever technical knowledge he’d bring over, the risk of a crippling lawsuit would be ever present - but he brings something much more valuable and needed by Cisco right now: The ability to turn things around. After John Chambers’ humbling admission that Cisco has been stumbling, it makes sense to bring in a veteran who, in just three years, dramatically raised Juniper’s profile and technical execution, and who had previously helped guide Sun into becoming a respectable enterprise service company.

With Juniper’s QFabric gaining ground and Cisco’s determination to refocus on its core enterprise customers, it looks like HP got its wish for more competition.

Michael Morisy is the editorial director for ITKnowledgeExchange. He can be followed on Twitter or you can reach him at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

The father of the Internet had some tough talk for one of his progeny. In a roundtable after his Interop keynote, Vint Cerf – instrumental in DARPA’s funding and guidance of the early TCP/IP protocol and currently a chief evangelist at Google – said cloud providers need to not only become better about giving companies and users access to their cloud data, but also in easily porting it from one platform to another.

The impetus to open up, he said, “always comes from users who say, ‘I will not use this unless I can get it in an open way.” There is hope, he said, drawing on the history of e-mail which slowly standardized while continuing to evolve over the years, but cloud providers need to be more creative about the opportunities that opening up could provide not just to users, but to the platforms themselves.

“Standards allow any cloud to view another cloud as if it were comparable,” he said. When that happens, clouds could specialize in what they’re best at: A great geolocating cloud, for example, could be given access to a real-estate database cloud only long enough to clean up and map the data. Getting to that point, however, is no small feat.

Cerf said that access controls and security rules need to be just as portable as the underlying information. “It’s not just about moving data,” he said.

Michael Morisy is the editorial director for ITKnowledgeExchange. He can be followed on Twitter or you can reach him at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

What war? On his first trip to Interop, HP’s Dave Donatelli worked hard to leave an impression, flouting convention by bringing out a sidekick to offer a product demo, while coyly making swipes at Cisco, which did its own keynote just a few hours later. The end result, however, made HP’s frontal assault on the current networking king seem more like a whimper than a bang.

The worst part wasn’t that HP’s keynote was an infomercial (so was Cisco’s, and we’ve come to expect that from the big corporate keynotes) but because the most damning critiques he lobbed tended to boil down to “Cisco is successful.”

His talk was full of choice data points that further proved this point, such as citing a Baird study that found “29% [of companies] said HP is influencing deal terms and winning over Cisco.” In other words, 71% of the time HP has no influence on the deal or is losing to Cisco. Not many execs would be humble enough to brag about such a record.

He then went on to proclaim that, “if you look at the industry, networking has had the least amount of competition.” I wanted to tell him not be so hard on himself.

Dave made clear HP’s commitment was to interoperability. In fact, he was so vendor agnostic I’m pretty sure he mentioned Cisco more than HP, a fact not lost on the restive audience.

So where is HP’s innovation focused? Network and data center management consoles. Time and time again, Dave said it was time to get IT management down to “one pane of glass.” Watch out, Spiceworks?

It’s a shame, because HP’s been making strides, gaining marketshare even as they flesh out their offerings beyond “cheaper than the other guys” (See SearchNetworking’s coverage of their latest announcement). But while HP (and everyone else) is aiming squarely at Cisco, there were a lot of “coming soons” amid feature lists that sounded very similar to not only Cisco but pretty much every other major vendor out there.

Next time, HP might do better to focus on what its customers’ need instead of what its competitors are doing.

Michael Morisy is the editorial director for ITKnowledgeExchange. He can be followed on Twitter or you can reach him at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/ElHHChHp3BU" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/GN6MEkRxW2Y" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

• For those of us who aren’t experts in the field of storage virtualization, we compiled the basics of storage virtualization to start the month off on the right foot.
• For real-time information on the goings-on in storage virtualization, we compiled the best of the best storage and virtualization pros to follow on Twitter.
• Despite the age of 140-character conversations, IT books are still a great way to get all the information you need in one place, and these storage virtualization books come highly recommended.
• For everything else, we have our Storage Virtualization Multimedia Guide, including top storage and virtualization blogs that have serious credibility in their respective expert communities.
• Storage virtualization is one of the best ways to celebrate Earth Day all year round.

Storage Virtualization 101

The Storage Network Industry Association has a booklet that covers the “different terms, types, locations, and technologies of storage virtualization and the data services that can be built on it” as well as descriptions of “implementation step by step and aspects of availability, performance, and capacity improvements.” Whether you’re interested in the role of storage virtualization or the many hypotheticals of the deployment, check out the SNIA’s booklet on storage virtualization (PDF).

Storage Virtualization FAQs

From Open IT Forum discussions to members curious about the technology, we’ve seen some thought-provoking discussions. Have a question about storage virtualization that wasn’t asked in the forums? Head over and ask it yourself. And don’t forget to tag it “storage virtualization”!

• What is the most important component of a virtualization strategy?
  
• What’s your attitude toward storage virtualization?
• Choosing disks for virtualization storage
• How does virtualization change my storage needs? (An important question, considering 43 percent of IT organizations underestimate or forget to calculate the impact storage will have on a virtualization project.)

And More…

For regular updates on virtualized storage like this one on the important niche of storage virtualization products and this great jumping off point for your own storage virtualization pros and cons list, check out SearchVirtualStorage.com.

Check out the Storage Decisions seminar on Storage for Virtual Environments for a one-day tutorial on maximizing your virtualization deployment with storage made specifically for your new environment.

Do Tell!

Did you enjoy Storage Virtualization month? Share one thing you learned in the comments section, and we’ll share 25 knowledge points to go toward our latest contest!

Next month on IT Knowledge Exchange…

May’s theme is Networking at IT Knowledge Exchange! Editor Michael Morisy is heading to Interop, so keep an eye for coverage of the festivities. Are you heading to Interop next month as well? Reach out and let Michael know at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

Bring your questions, ideas, and suggestions to the forums and the blogs. Learn something, teach something, and earn great prizes!

Are there other topics you would be interested in seeing explored around IT Knowledge Exchange in the future? Let us know in the comments section or send me an email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

Melanie Yarbrough is the assistant community editor at ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Follow her on Twitter or send her an email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

Image Source: Gartner, Inc.

Despite IT’s general disinterest in all things cloud, conferences such as last week’s Interop NY dedicated the majority of their sessions to the subject: 40 of over 100 sessions and expo floor presentations centered around the cloud. But according to Gartner Inc.’s 2010 Hype Cycle Report, released earlier this month, IT professionals everywhere can finally exhale. According to the report, cloud computing has reached the peak of its hype cycle and will become mainstream within the next five years. VP and Fellow at Gartner, Jackie Fenn, attributes the focus on technologies such as the cloud to “particularly high levels of hype, or [because they] may not be broadly acknowledged but which we believe have the potential for significant impact.”

Though the cloud and all its bells and whistles has yet to dive through the “Trough of Disillusionment,” the end of its marketing heyday will allow for a more realistic approach by users. Cloud evangelist Randy Bias already takes a pragmatic approach to the cloud, offering this advice: Make sure your app is performing properly on your current infrastructure before sending it to the cloud. With less inflated expectations, users can begin to research the specific aspects of cloud computing that pertain to them and can benefit their business. It seems some businesses are already doing their specified research: When I stopped at the Rackspace booth, they said they saw fewer questions about security and compliance this year; those questions were more predominant last year. This year more people were concerned with exactly what apps to send to the cloud. Vendors such as Cloudscaling and Nimbo Tech are seeing some trends of functions to send to the cloud with their clients using dev test and DR.

John Shaw of Nimbo Tech predicted we’re in the first wave of cloud adoption, where the majority of people trust their data to email and document cloud options. The second and third phases will include SaaS apps, SAP, BI and data that enterprises want to store outside of the firewall to share with partners. Now that cloud computing is descending the path away from its puffed-up and misunderstood image, perhaps we can move on to the second and third waves.

Let us know what you think of Gartner’s interpretation of where the cloud falls on the hype cycle. To figure out where you are in the hype cycle and where you should be, check out this week’s free IT book giveaway: Mastering the Hype Cycle: How to Choose the Right Innovation at the Right Time by Jackie Fenn and Mark Raskino.

Melanie Yarbrough is the assistant community editor at ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Follow her on Twitter or send her an email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

This method of managing provisioning and configuration involves codifying something that you’re currently doing manually. This will require different tools and levels of management as your infrastructure evolves.

Automation by Phase

• Server consolidation: Start off simple, utilizing scripts you’ve probably compiled on your own to simplify the manual processes. At this stage, vendor tools will be deployed to share these shortcuts across the enterprise.
• Infrastructure optimization: Support begins to expand beyond single vendors, and capacity management becomes an issue. Automation takes on the responsibility of patching and managing configuration.
• Automation & Orchestration: Another level of maturity in your virtualization strategy means adding provisioning, configuration standardization, compliance, running processes, application deployment, and self-service (or private cloud-like services) to the automated mix.
• Dynamic Data Center: Whether or not this means deploying a private cloud, reaching this level of maturity in your strategy heightens your application portability and calls for SLA-accompanied automation.

Not so fast

Bottom line is, if your application is faulty in the traditional model, it will be faulty in the young and hip model. There are opportunities to ease yourself into the water, however, to make sure that the applications you’re choosing to deploy atop a new infrastructure are the right ones. Rackspace’s recent OpenStack – their open source offering of their very own code – allows you to integrate the code you’d be utilizing in the cloud in your very own infrastructure. Not only can you get comfortable in your comfort zone, running the code in front of the eyes of your own team members before sending your babies out into the cloud, but you can monitor how your applications will run in that environment.

As with all technology that promises to deliver ease-of-use, there are many ways automation can go wrong. Before implementation, ensure each instance has been tested and that there are periodic checks in place once deployed.

Though the conversation at events such as Interop is dominated by cloud, there are specific and real-time practices that you can begin implementing today to prepare yourself for the somewhat cloudy future.

Melanie Yarbrough is the assistant community editor at ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Follow her on Twitter or send her an email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.