SyncEXPERT

It would be unoriginal for me to submit some sort of apology for the delay between my posts, so I won’t offer one. I’m unsure who would care if I neglected to include one anyhow. ^_^

One of the subjects that I have been doing a lot of business research into of late is one of the current IT industry darlings, virtualization. I have a lot of personal and professional interest in learning more on this topic because its impact on how traditional proprietary software companies license their software and because the flexibility and efficiency opportunities that it presents businesses with a significant IT infrastructure.

Like a lot of new technologies, I think there is a gap between the promise of virtualization and the reality of what can be delivered with the current state of the technology. One key example of this gap is the best-articulated business value of virtualization, server consolidation. I recently attended a seminar held locally by VMware where the typical server consolidation ratio for VMware customers was cited as being between 8 and 12 to 1 with some customers achieving a 30 to 1 server consolidation ratio. A 30 to 1, 12 to 1, or even 8 to 1 consolidation in server hardware is remarkable to consider in any case, and would likely get the attention of anyone seeking to reduce the acquisition, deployment, support, power, cooling, and maintenance costs of servers within an IT organization.

So what’s the gap here? Basically, that degree of server consolidation assumes that the applications running on the guest machines at most, use the network infrequently or not at all. A recent Wall Street Journal article (Real Virtualization Battle Looms, 2/26/2008) highlighted the “communications bottleneck between server systems that has made it impractical to use virtualization for some of the most demanding applications, such as large databases”. In essence, this says that forcing applications requiring significant use of the network to share the network I/O resources of a single server with other operating systems and applications isn’t practical. The WSJ article does note that there are some organizations looking at solving the problem of managing network I/O for virtualized environments, but at the same time, if an organization has many applications already running near capacity on a robust hardware configurations, it seems unlikely that virtualization alone will offer them much in the way of a consolidation benefit since increasing network bandwidth isn’t easy or cheap.

I do think that the future of virtualization is bright and offers a great deal of promise for the future of IT organizations of all shapes and sizes. Until the practical challenges of consolidating network I/O-heavy applications to a significant enough degree to experience real cost savings is solved, however, the full scope of virtualization’s server consolidation benefits will remain untapped.

“Gee Mike, how can I become as wise about data connectivity as you?”

The above question is proof that although a question may be easy to ask, the answer may not be simple (nor the questioner sane in this case). My professional career started without even cursory knowledge of what a driver was, how relational databases worked, or even how to program in something more modern than FORTRAN (not dating myself as much as hinting that my college career was somewhat atypical for someone in my position). Since that time I have become “sufficiently proficient” in the subject of data connectivity to get myself into trouble, but not quite good enough to get myself out - sort of an anti-Macgyver in that regard.

Anyway, the purpose of this post is to share with you the secret of how I managed to acquire the thimbleful of lore that I have to date: listening to people smarter than myself. Thankfully for me, I haven’t had to look far for overqualified individuals at my place of employment - it’s like looking for a tall tree in a forest of redwoods. The great news is that these resident geniuses are actually more interested in going forth and helping others who grapple with the weighty questions involving data connectivity than they are in trying to give me the “Dick and Jane” version of every new concept that comes along.

You can meet these Superstars of Standards-Based Database Access APIs at DataDirect’s Architect Tutorials at one of the following dates and locations:

Thursday, October 4th | St. Louis, MO - Hilton Frontenac
Thursday, October 11th | Toronto, ON - Westin Harbour Castle
Tuesday, October 16th | Irvine, CA - Hyatt Regency

This year’s theme is, “Successful Strategies for SOA Enablement & Data Connectivity,” which sounds much more useful and technical than “See Spot Program ‘Hello World’ In FORTRAN”. If my personal recommendation amounts to anything - attend and don’t forget to bring a warm thinking cap.

With apologies to Tears for Fears, it’s time for me to shout (not a RickRoll) about a few items that I think deserve some attention.

First and foremost, my esteemed colleague Mike Johnson has written an excellent article entitled The Importance of Data Connectivity to Virtualization. Rather than being a tribute to a cleverly written play by Oscar Wilde, Mike’s article presents the case for choosing high quality data connectivity components in order to maximize an investment in virtualization.

Second, if you haven’t yet signed up to attend Data Services World, I would recommend you get off of your duff and do so. The conference, scheduled for June 24, 3008 at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York, features a keynote delivered by John Goodson, an industry luminary in data connectivity and someone that I report up to. Anyone interested in learning more about data services should attend as John is as excellent a speaker as he is a generous boss. ^_^

Third, and finally, I’d like to call attention to beer that I had recently, a 2007 Abyss from Deschutes Brewery out of Bend Oregon. For any of you who like your beer strong, dark, and complex, I would strongly recommend you find a bottle of this delicious Imperial Stout to try. If you don’t - feel free to ship me another bottle so I can enjoy this beer all over again. Slàinte!