Vendor Preference Holy War

Why is it we technical professionals, acquire such strong loyalties toward our vendor of choice? Just ask a group of UNIX admins which UNIX variant is the "Best". I find this particularly intriguing in the realm of Backup and Recovery products. Some love Symantect NetBackup, others love Tivoli Storage Manager, and yet others gravitate towards a handful of other vendor providers (legato, HP, MS, CA, etc). What gives? Ask any line of business leader which backup product they prefer and you'll get a blank stare. Why? First off all the business really cares about is that when time to restore that file better be there and fast. Okay but what about the IT leadership? Do they have a preference. My experience indicates that indeed they do. So what makes my backup software better than yours? We could blog for years on this one topic alone. Many products have intelligent servers coupled with a type of database that tracks all your files. Some have simple clients that simply open a TCP port for the server to control backup functions (NBU, HP Data Protector). Others have extremely intellignet clients that can push data at the server (e.g. TSM). While the architecture may matter to those dealing with restore functions daily. I submit that perhaps total cost of ownership might be the biggest reason to pick one product over another. How much is training, maintenance, initial cost? When do I get a return on this investment? The first time you have to restore a major system and it works!

Storage, storage, and more storage

I was overwhelmed with the many storage solutions and vendors I saw at VMworld this year. Apparently everyone and their dog has a storage array for use with VMware's hypervisor. How do you pick the right one for you? This boasts fastest SPC-1 benchmark, that one boasts better software, they all provide Thin technologies, some have SATA drives, some have FC. Some tell you that they will place the data on the inside of the platters for Tier-1. What's an IT decision maker to do? iSCSI or FCoE? With so many decisions how can you ensure you make the right decision for your organization? I think it's simple. Pick a device that can scale, meet your performance needs, provide the easiest management software you can get. And above all, I really don't think what the drive behind the connector looks like. Behind the connector you see heads, platters, read arms, etc. They are essentially the same. I've held an axiom for a long time. Your business can be successful with any technology. Most of the time the difference between what EMC, NetApp, HP, or IBM has to offer is like choosing a server platform based on its power cord. One or two features may make it easier, but really are those features worth the money the SAN vendors offer? Stay tuned!

VMWorld Day Three and wrap-up

I continue to be impressed with how much bigger this show gets each and every year. One interesting (at least I think it is) comparison I made was that each year in the past there seems to be an announcement of a new product ready to ship. Last year was ESX 3i, year before was 3.0, and this year VMware announced that something will be coming in the future. At least they took the announcement of Datacenter OS one step further by at least having some demos and labs with early beta code around this new technology available for attendees. I can't help but think however, with Mr. Maritz at the helm, what type of company will VMware turn into? Right now we have the competition all claiming their hypervisor is faster. What if VMware owns 99% of the market and gets proud and rests on it's laurels? Will IT admins turn against the mother ship? I for one love an underdog story. But I really love it when competition makes the best products and services any company can provide!

At least I've become a VDI believer during this conference. I'm just not convinced that VMware is the best implementation out there right now. XenDesktop may prove superior and with Microsoft using it as well...we have a little bit of a showdown on our hands.

VMWorld Day Two

A few things stood out to me today. Perhaps a strange observation first; I was blown away by the amount of Mac laptops amongst the attendees. Don't get me wrong there are tons of thinkpads, dells, and HP notebooks too. Could it be that VMware's Fusion is helping people buy more apples? Okay now for the good stuff. VDI is legit! With today's announcement's (partnership with PC over IP technolgists Teradici). Two of the biggest limitations of VDI in the past, RDP and Mobile users, are planned to be solved by VMware. Next, Storage-a-plenty. Forget the price of gas. VMware runs on storage. So what's different about all these voices clammoring for your dollars for their platters? I'm on a quest to see if there's anything different out there. 3par has a unique packaging and touts 200k+ IOPS. When asked what separates them from the rest of the crowd the 3par rep told me I could use half as much of his disk than any of the competitors. Now, I think perhaps the most undermarketed part of VMware is Storage VMotion. This is very cool technology and capability that goes unnoticed perhaps due to no fancy GUI.

First Impressions

Arrived at VMWorld 2008. Even bigger than the last two I've attended. Predicting 14,000-15,000 people. Hot topics of the day yesterday were (as predicted) VDI. ESXi, Datacenter OS, and the gaglge of vendors here that have some type of supportive offering (thin client vendors, management toolset vendors, hardware vendors, and storage a plenty). It's interesting to note the buzz around competition again this year. All the sessions I attended mentioned something about Hyper-v. If I have the best Hypervisor around why would I continue to give creedence to my competition if they are inferior. I'll be looking into what competitive solutions are around and their differentiators.

Off to VMWorld

Heading out in the morning to VMworld 2008. This is the third time I've attended this conference. I'll be focused on what's new and exciting about x86 Virtualization. In particular I have an unpopular view of VDI and all hosted desktop virtualization. I think it's hype! I lived the euphoria of Thin Computing as a Citrix consultant many years ago. It didn't take off then. Perhaps having one's own VM will change everything.

I predict the following to be big hitters this year:
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
Virtual Datacenter (site recovery, lifecycle manager, etc)
Competition. I predict that there will be much bashing of competing vendors Virtualization technologies.