Taking Virtualization to the Next Level

If an event has 215 sponsors and exhibitors, all focused on one area of
computing-virtualization-it is bound to be a mix of big and small, good and bad
offerings.

Commercial Cloud computing

While the biggies like Dell, Citrix, Dell, and Cisco put on display their
road map for the next few months, using VMware's expertise and support, PCQuest
found a few offbeat companies, mostly based out of North America and the APAC
region, which offer solutions aimed at taking virtualization to the next level.
An ideal example is 3tera, which calls itself 'an innovator in cloud computing
technology,' offers solutions to eliminate routine infrastructure deployment,
configuration, and maintenance. The philosophy here is to assume that as cloud
computing grows, there will be increased demand and as businesses grow, the
ability to add on demand virtual applications will increase.

3tera's AppLogic platform claims to be the world's first turn-key commercial
cloud computing platform, which includes a grid operating system, an IP SAM, an
open source based user interface, and flexible software stacks. In other words,
unlike other exhibitors whose products sit on VMware's platform, AppLogic is the
platform itself, which can be deployed on any server layer, and instances can be
set by the network administrator, and applications can be invoked dynamically
and in real time. In terms of its architecture, between the 'security ingress'
and 'data tier', the offering provides a Web tier which 'talks to' both. Each
instance in the Web tier is connected by an individual and exclusive channel to
the data, ensuring that even in the remote case of a security hazard having
seeped through the ingress layer, it does not affect the data layer in any way.

Keep your virtual environment healthy

Another interesting offering is from a California-based company called Integrien,
which is a 'support provider' for virtualization vendors like VMware, Citrix,
IBM, and Sun Solaris. The latest offering called Integrien Alive for Virtual
Environments, is an application that automatically manages the health of your
virtual environment. Stemming off from the fact that growth of server
consolidation provides clear cost reductions, managing the performance of the
network and keeping a tab on the availability of virtualized applications and
components is increasingly seen as a concern, Integrien Alive 'learns' the
normal behavior of all individual components and uses predictive analysis
techniques to understand the complex interactions of data variables which causes
deformity in the virtualized network. The network administrator will have access
to a 'health score' individually for physical and virtual infrastructure
components that support an application or service so that the 'worst performers'
can be worked upon. The in-built Smart Alert application pinpoints the root
cause of the problem, whether it is in the virtualized network, or elsewhere.

Data center in a container

Imagine a datacenter with a maximum capacity of 28 racks of servers, 22,400
cores and 7.1 petabytes of storage, localized airflow and state-of-the-art
cooling structure. Now imagine all of this inside a portable container box-size
that fits a regular truck or sea shipment-available in two size variants.
Rackable Systems displayed the Ice Cube, claiming to be the world's most
efficient modular datacenter. A self-contained box aiming to eliminate the brick
and mortar model of servers completely, the Ice Cube packs in eight processors
and 8 terabytes in only the space of 2 units of rack space and works on DC
power, on a self-contained UPS technology created in house. Cooling cost is said
to be 80% lower than traditional datacenters. Rackable also provides a patented
'half-depth' servers based on Intel Xeon, sitting on a chassis which provides
double the density per cabinet, and can be preconfigured for upto 336 terabytes
per cabinet.

The Ice Cube claims to reduce service time by 75% since all the ports are
'front facing', making them easily accessible and aiding error detection, and
Rackable on request comes powered with quad-core servers with up to 6 expansion
slots, with options of AMD Opteron or the Intel Xeon, and a SAS expansion
system.

On one hand, VMworld '08 featured an array of products and applications to
take cloud computing to the next level, but on the other hand, a significant
chunk of offerings were based on the idea of already virtualized networks,
hardware and software to be able to work more efficiently and scale up as and
when it's required.

(Vishnu Anand was hosted by VMware at Las Vegas for VMworld 08)