The Pervasive Data Center

On the one hand, vendor analyst events are a good opportunity to spend focused time diving deep into individual products, roadmaps, and corporate initiatives. On the other, they're a useful forum for getting the feel of a company's overall zeitgeist in a way that narrower discussions don't. EMC's event, held last week in Franklin, Mass., was no exception.

(Credit: EMC)

Perhaps the single thing that struck me most about the event as a whole was the full integration of VMware into the discussion as a whole. I've been following both companies since before EMC acquired VMware in 2003. In the years since, although there were the obligatory nods to joint development work and "better together," VMware aggressively maintained a distance that was hardly limited to the 3,000 miles between VMware's Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters and EMC in Massachusetts. VMware's presence at EMC analyst events was largely relegated to a few off-hand mentions and perhaps a desultory breakout session given by a junior marketing person.

This year couldn't have been more different. VMware was very much woven into just about every discussion and one of VMware's senior technologists shared a panel with representatives from EMC and Cisco Systems. One thing that has changed, of course, is the ouster of VMware founder and CEO Diane Greene in 2008. It was Greene who most vocally kept EMC at arm's length. It's also the case that virtualization is increasingly at the center of everything that EMC does, so how could VMware not be an integral part?

This pervasive virtualization theme carried through to EMC VP Jon Peirce's discussion about EMC's internal IT infrastructure as well. EMC IT is using VMware to virtualize as much as possible. This includes doing database testing on a Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) in advance of a planned migration off Sun E25000 UltraSPARC-based servers.

An initial Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) deployment also uses UCS in the form of a vBlock--a preconfigured package that combines products from Cisco, EMC, and VMware. EMC has about 200 users on VDI today and expects to roll out to several thousand next year starting in their Franklin facility. VDI and associated forms of desktop virtualization are a favorite technology of CEO Joe Tucci, who would like to move toward a platform-agnostic client strategy.

The ultimate goal is what sometimes goes by BYOPC (Bring Your Own PC), in which employees provide their own notebook computers, perhaps purchased with the help of a stipend. Even today, many of the EMC execs at the event were sporting Macs, even though IT doesn't officially support them.

Another hot topic at the event was multi-tier storage, in this case automatic storage tiering that intelligently moves data between Flash-based storage and conventional disk drives. EMC's technology here is called FAST and will roll out on Symmetrix V-Max arrays.

Flash drives can be much faster than SATA disks--or even high-performance Fibre Channel drives--but they're also much more expensive on a per-GB basis. The idea behind FAST is to automate the placement of data based on the way its accessed. For example, a database index that is frequently read and written to will migrate to high performance flash while older data that hasn't been touched for a while will move to slower, cheaper disks.

Disks being used to store rarely accessed archival data can even be deduped, compressed, and even spun down to reduce overall data center power consumption. Tape isn't part of this vision; Tucci opined that "Backup to and recovery from tape is dead."

The idea of storage tiering isn't new. Hierarchical storage management (HSM) has been around for well over a decade. However, in practice, it's mostly ended up being about moving old files to tape for archive purposes. (EMC itself has a product in this vein: Legato DiskXtended.) FAST is something more transparent and more dynamic.

There are analogs between FAST and the storage pooling that is part of Sun Microsystems' ZFS filesystem. EMC argues that the function belongs on the storage device rather than the server because the array is where data access from multiple systems and applications come together.

It's unsurprising that EMC wants storage to be at the center of things. This is a company, after all, whose tagline is "where information lives." It is, however, worth remembering that this is a different lens through which to view the world than system vendors tend to choose--and, for that matter, than VMware chose historically.

Although VMware got its start with a desktop virtualization product aimed at developers, the company today is best known for bringing server virtualization to the mainstream.

Creating multiple virtual servers on a single physical system lets IT departments consolidate applications onto fewer computers and thereby cut costs. Over time, server virtualization has also enabled a variety of products and approaches that can simplify IT operations and generally make data centers more flexible.

VMware has continued to invest in virtualization aimed at the client. This includes client-side hypervisors such as its original VMware Workstation product. However, products and technologies associated with delivering applications and user desktops to the client are really the main focus.

Application and desktop delivery sometimes makes use of client hypervisors but it's a largely separate category of technology that's fundamentally about centrally managing user applications and/or operating-system images. In VMware's case, virtualized desktops fall under the VMware View name.

On Monday, VMware announced VMware View 4, the latest version of its virtual desktop portfolio.

Much of VMware's development focus with View 4 was in the area of the user experience--that is, making applications and desktops delivered from a central location perform with the same responsiveness and fidelity as if they were installed on a local PC, in the usual way.

Historically, this user experience has been one of the stumbling blocks for desktop virtualization in general. Older forms of Citrix Presentation Server (now rebadged and modernized under the XenApp label) and initial virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) implementations very much tried to simplify management and otherwise deliver direct benefits for IT operations. Whether users liked using the products was secondary.

As a result, desktop virtualization has been mostly something used by what are often called "task workers." Think call centers and other groups of users with specific jobs to do and not much say about the tools they use to do it. In general, desktop virtualization promoters have focused too much on delivering benefits to IT and not enough on delivering benefits to users. (They've also arguably paid too little attention to keeping up-front costs down and relied too much on promises of soft cost savings down the road.)

One of the technology pieces that VMware is leaning on to improve user experience is the PC over Internet Protocol (PCoIP). PCoIP was originally developed by Teradici to improve the responsiveness and display quality of virtual desktops. However, in Teradici's initial implementation, specialized hardware was needed on both ends of the wire. This effectively made it a premium solution for situations in which cost wasn't a factor, such as for financial traders and government agencies for which security considerations are paramount.

VMware has worked with Teradici to create a software-only version of the protocol. Desktop virtualization Chief Technology Officer Scott Davis goes into a lot of the details on his blog.

It's a User Datagram Protocol-based server-side protocol that transmits compressed bitmaps or frames to the remote client. This has the advantage of being able to make real-time adjustments to account for the available bandwidth and latency of the communications channel; the display quality degrades, if there isn't enough bandwidth but things still "work."

Although details differ, there are similarities to Sun's Appliance Link Protocol--which is well-regarded for its ability to deal with poor-quality connections. (A downside of server-side protocols is that they consume processing horsepower on the server, where it tends to be more expensive, rather than on the client.)

VMware will continue to support other remote display protocols, most notably Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol. However, VMware is clearly positioning PCoIP as its favored technology and a point of competitive differentiation for VMware View in general.

Also in the graphics area, View 4 adds "multimonitor, adaptive display support--resolution optimization for each monitor, with an option to pivot and rotate the display output, supporting rich audio and video content with increased performance."

Other user experience enhancements generally relate to better integration with the overall desktop environment. For example, View Printing automatically discovers local printers without the need to install print drivers. View Limited Access provides a single point of authentication across VMware View environments, Windows Terminal Servers, Blade PCs, and remote physical PCs.

VMware View 4 comes in two editions. The Enterprise Edition includes the basics: VSphere 4 (the back-end server virtualization product), VCenter 4 (management), and View Manager 4 (for provisioning user access). It's priced at $150 per concurrent connection.

The $250-per-concurrent-user Premier Edition adds ThinApp 4 (for delivering ad hoc applications that aren't part of a master image) and View Composer (for managing images), both capabilities that would typically be desired in a large or sophisticated deployment.

VMware as a whole approaches the world from the perspective of the enterprise data center. Delivering desktops from that data center was somewhat of a sideshow. Is it now as focused on application delivery as, say, Citrix? Not really. But that said, desktop virtualization has moved beyond the sideshow stage at VMware.

Correction at 7:15 a.m. PST November 4: At one time, Red Hat had planned to ship an embedded KVM hypervisor based on Fedora. But the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor uses the RHEL 5.4 kernel and thereby picks up the same hardware verification portfolio.

With Tuesday's release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager (RHEV-M) for servers, the company has completed the first phase of a server virtualization rollout that effectively now puts KVM front and center. Red Hat released KVM commercially for the first time in September as part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4.

KVM is a server virtualization technology that Red Hat acquired when it bought Qumranet in 2008. Red Hat favors KVM over the other primary open-source hypervisor, Xen, for both business and technical reasons. (Although, as of version 5.4, Xen remains the default hypervisor for RHEL.)

The business reason is that, while Red Hat has made contributions to Xen, competitors are far more associated with the project. Novell, the owners of the only other major enterprise Linux distribution, ran especially hard with Xen early on. And Citrix, not a direct competitor but certainly a major virtualization player, bought XenSource, the commercial entity formed by Xen's creators.

From a technical perspective, Red Hat's issue is that it's hard to keep Xen and the Linux kernel in sync. Xen's a standalone hypervisor layer but it has deeply invasive hooks into the Linux kernel and, therefore, keeping the two working together takes a lot of development and testing effort. It's a bit reminiscent of how new versions of the Veritas file system had to be carefully matched to new versions of Solaris or HP-UX.

By contrast, KVM is kernel-based. This means that it is actually part and parcel of the Linux kernel rather than a quasi-independent piece of software. In part for this reason, it's KVM that is now included in the mainline Linux kernel as of version 2.6.20.

As of version 5.4, an instance of RHEL can host guest virtual machines running RHEL 5 and other operating systems including Windows Server 2008. This announcement adds Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor, something that is often referred to as an "embedded hypervisor." It uses the same RHEL 5.4 kernel as Red Hat's full enterprise distribution.

Embedded hypervisors have taken off more slowly than many of us expected. But all the major virtualization players offer one so Red Hat needed to as well.

From my perspective, the Red Hat Virtualization Manager is more significant. On the one hand, management is important to--indeed central to--virtualization. On the other hand, it's an area where Red Hat has lagged. CTO Brian Stevens admitted as much to me when we spoke at the company's financial analyst day last month when he said that RHEV-M "has been a huge missing ingredient."

Red Hat historically mostly focused on updating packages. This is a reflection of the broader Linux and open-source ecosystem in general. Projects like Nagios and, more recently, GroundWork notwithstanding, management doesn't play well to the strengths of open source because it's such a "high surface area" application. But Red Hat had to attack management from some angle unless it was prepared to just cede that area of differentiation and potential point of control to system makers and others.

RHEV-M is Red Hat's first step toward remedying this deficiency. It seems a necessary move especially given that KVM is likely to be used, at least initially, as part of a Red Hat software stack and therefore Red Hat pretty much has to support the tools to manage KVM if it's to gain any market traction.

That said, this is very much a first step. The initial product only manages KVM. Furthermore, the management server has to be running Windows Server 2003 which you would rightly think a rather odd decision from a company that is one of the pioneers of open source. (Apparently, this was a decision by Qumranet and Red Hat has not yet developed a version that can run on Linux.)

Red Hat has clearly prioritized getting a usable if limited product into customers' hands. They trotted out one such at their financial analyst day. Dave Costakos of Qualcomm was happy with what he saw. He told me that they wanted a Web-based interface, which RHEV Manager has. He also liked the integration with Active Directory and other directory systems, the role-based access controls, and the provisioning capabilities.

Overall, Red Hat's virtualization play remains less filled in than do the plays of others. But it's now started in a systematic way.

Server virtualization means something fairly specific. Storage virtualization is a bit more diffuse. But it's I/O virtualization that really covers a lot of ground.

At a high level, virtualization means turning physical resources into logical ones. It's a layer of abstraction. In this sense, it's something that the IT industry has been doing for essentially forever. For example, when you write a file to disk, you're taking advantage of many software and hardware abstractions such as the operating system's file system and logical block addressing in the disk controller. Collectively, each of these virtualization levels simplify how what's above interacts with what's below.

I/O virtualization brings these principles to the edge of the network. Its general goal is to eliminate the inflexible physical association between specific network interface controllers (NICs) and host bus adapters (HBAs) and specific servers. As a practical matter in a modern data center, this usually comes down to virtualizing Gigabit Ethernet (and 10 GbE to come) and Fibre Channel links.

Virtualizing these resources brings some nice benefits. Physical resources can be carved up and allocated to servers based on what they need to run a particular workload. This becomes especially important when the servers themselves are virtualized. I/O virtualization can also decouple network and storage administration from server administration--tasks that are often performed by different people. For example, IP addresses and World Wide Names (a unique identifier for storage targets) can be pre-allocated to a pool of servers.

That's I/O virtualization conceptually. Vendors are approaching from a lot of different directions.

For starters, like many things, I/O virtualization has its roots in the mainframe. From virtual networking within servers to channelized I/O without, many aspects of I/O virtualization first appeared in what is now IBM's System z from whence it made its way into other forms of "Big Iron" from IBM and others. Thus, many servers today have various forms of virtual networking within the box whereby virtual machines communicate with each other using internal high-performance connections that appear as network links to software.

However, I/O virtualization in the distributed systems sense first arrived in blade server designs. Egenera was the pioneer here. HP's Virtual Connect for its c-Class BladeSystem and IBM Open Fabric for its BladeCenter are more recent and more widely sold examples. And virtualization, including I/O virtualization, lies at the heart of Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS).

Blade architectures incorporate third-party switches and other products to various degrees. However, they're largely an integrated technology stack from a single vendor. Indeed, this integration has arguably come to be seen as one of the virtues of blades. In this sense, they can be thought of as a distributed system analog to large-scale SMP.

A new crop of products in a similar vein aren't tied to a single vendor's servers.

Aprius, Virtensys, and NextIO are each taking slightly different angles, but all are essentially bringing PCI Express out of the server to an external chassis where the NICs and HBAs then reside. These cards can then be sliced up in software and divvied up among the connected servers. Xsigo is another company taking a comparable approach but using InfiniBand-based technology rather than PCIe.

Whatever the technology specifics, the basic idea is to create a virtualized pool of I/O resources that can be allocated (and moved around) based on what an individual server requires to run a given workload most efficiently.

There's a final interesting twist to I/O virtualization. And that's access to storage over a network connection. While network-attached file servers are suitable for many tasks, heavy-duty production applications often need the typically higher performance provided by so-called block-mode access. For more than a decade, this has tended to translate into storage subsystems consisting of disk arrays connected to servers by a dedicated Fibre Channel-based storage area network (SAN).

However, with the advent of 10 GbE networks and associated enhancements to Ethernet protocols, we're starting to see interest in the idea of a "unified fabric"--a single infrastructure to handle both networking and storage traffic. One of the key technology components here is a protocol called Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) that allows block-mode storage access originally intended for Fibre Channel networks to traverse 10 GbE instead.

There's more to unified fabrics than that involving alternate protocols such as iSCSI and various acceleration technologies but for our purposes here, I'll use FCoE as a blanket term.

So what does FCoE have to do with I/O virtualization? After all, an adapter card optimized for FCoE can be virtualized alongside other NICs and HBAs. So, at first glance, you might think that FCoE and I/O virtualization were simply complementary.

At one level, you'd be right. Aprius, for example, advertises that it provides "virtualized and shared access to data and storage network resources (Ethernet, CEE, iSCSI, FCoE, network accelerators) across an entire rack of servers, utilizing the ubiquitous PCI Express (PCIe) bus found in every server."

However, considered more broadly, I/O virtualization and FCoE solve many of the same problems--that of connecting servers to different types of networks without a lot of cards and cables associated with each individual server.

Adapters that connect to converged networks will themselves converge to card designs that can handle a wide range of both networking and storage traffic. Furthermore, if Ethernet's history is any indication, prices are likely to drop significantly over time; this would make finely allocating networking resources among servers less critical.

To the degree that each server can get a relatively inexpensive adapter that can handle multiple tasks, the rationale of bringing PCIe out to an external I/O pool is, at the least, much reduced. There are still rationales for virtualizing I/O in some form--especially in an integrated environment such as blades. Cisco, for example, puts both FCoE and virtualization front-and-center with its Unified Computing System. But narrow justifications for I/O virtualization such as reducing the number of I/O cards required are significantly weakened by FCoE.

At the end, FCoE may not be I/O virtualization as such but it's closely related in function if not in form.

It used to be that system management products were for the care and feeding of individual servers. They could deal with many of them, sure, and might even have had tools aimed at automating repetitive operations. But, fundamentally, they mostly looked at systems in isolation.

Enterprise management tools, on the other hand, looked at the IT infrastructure big picture. Sophisticated and complex, tools like CA's Unicenter, HP's OpenView, and IBM's Tivoli were the aggregation point for alerts and reports about the health of an organization's IT. But they rarely actually did anything; they watched for problems but it was other software or system administrators that had to actually swing into action.

The bottoms-up orientation of system management tended to win out over time. Enterprise management was never displaced--exactly. But it did long seem as if many of the products in the enterprise management space sat far from where the interesting action was in the data center.

However, today, we're seeing a shift to system management that happens at the level of the data center as a whole or at least a virtualized pool of systems and applications. Virtualization is one of the drivers here. Another is "private clouds" or, if you prefer, a more dynamic and services-oriented view of IT resources.

As a result, system management products are starting to take on more and more of the roles that were traditionally associated with enterprise management. We're also seeing systems management meet enterprise management in the middle, so to speak. IBM's VMControl announcement on October 20 is a case in point.

As IBM puts it in their release: "VMControl allows combinations of physical and virtual IBM servers to be managed as a single entity. This approach--known as system pooling--expands the benefits of virtualization by helping corporate data centers simplify complex management functions and better share and prioritize use of critical resources such as processing power, memory and storage."

The new product, IBM Systems Director VMControl Enterprise Edition, is focused on virtualized environments. It supports IBM's PowerVM and z/VM as well as x86 virtualization technologies such as VMWare, Hyper-V and open x86 virtualization solutions. IBM plans to first offer it on IBM Power Systems running AIX in December, 2009 with other platforms coming next year.

VMControl Enterprise Edition works in concert with Tivoli; IBM also announced "a new version of Tivoli Provisioning Manager that provides enhanced automation of the manual tasks of provisioning and configuring servers, operating systems, middleware, software applications, storage and network devices." As I've discussed previously, Tivoli is very much a central part of how IBM views cloud computing and therefore how it thinks about the evolution of the enterprise data center.

PowerVM itself, as its full name implies, is part of IBM's Systems Director family. This is IBM's systems management portfolio; rough counterparts are HP Systems Insight Manager, Dell OpenManage, and Sun xVM Ops Center. Systems Director has been the recipient of considerable development and marketing attention in recent years that have greatly improved its integration across IBM's disparate product lines as well as its overall functionality.

Virtualization is no longer just about server consolidation. It does that, sure, and thereby reduces the number of physical servers that an organization needs to purchase. But, especially in enterprises, it's increasingly as much about resource pools and services (such as disaster recovery) enabled by virtualization as it is about consolidation. And that makes the need for management more rather than less.

The debate over single-function server appliances versus general-purpose servers is a long-standing one.

Appliances first came onto the scene in the late 1990s during the first Internet boom. They focused on a particular task, such as Web serving, and were designed to be ready to install with minimum muss, fuss, or skill. This assembly line approach to server farms was to be the secret sauce that made possible infinite growth without infinite IT staff.

Cobalt Networks was perhaps the best known and most sophisticated of the companies to offer appliances. Sun Microsystems later acquired Cobalt and then failed to successfully integrate it. This arguably presaged the mixed history of subsequent Sun acquisitions in general. But it also highlighted how server appliances remained much more of a niche than envisioned by their more vocal proponents.

The knocks on server appliances then and now haven't changed much. EMC Global Marketing CTO Chuck Hollis lays out some of the negatives in a recent post.

It's not the first big appliance that causes the problem, it's when you have a fleet of them that you realize you've traded one class of headache for another.

None of them are built the same way. None of them manage the same way. None of them are supported the same way. None of them know how to work together in a cooperative fashion, and so on.

Want standardization at the different layers of an architectural stack? Sorry.

Want a pool of resources that can flow and flex to support whatever workload is at hand? Sorry, can't do.

Want to use the latest-greatest infrastructure technology from (choose your favorite vendor here)? Sorry about that as well.

Hollis sums up his case as follows: "You can see the nature of the trade-off, can't you? It's basically trading immediate gratification for a specific project versus creating long-term value through IT infrastructure."

EMC's interest in this debate is twofold.

The first is to push the notion of virtual appliances, pre-built virtual machine images that can be deployed on a virtual infrastructure. The idea is that an IT department can buy or build an encapsulated stack of software for a particular function and then deploy it across a server infrastructure of their own choosing. Given that EMC owns about 90 percent of VMware, its interest in promoting additional reasons to deploy server virtualization is obvious.

Virtual appliances also have a close affinity to cloud-computing infrastructure as a service. Amazon Machine Images (AMI) are a form of virtual appliance. And EMC is moving in this direction as well with Atmos.

The second reason that we see Chuck Hollis pushing back on the appliance concept is that we're seeing other large and powerful vendors, his competitors, promoting it. As opposed to the appliances of the Internet boom that mostly focused on network functions, this round is also, or even primarily, about heavy-duty business applications.

Oracle's Exadata is perhaps the canonical example of today's "Big Appliance," as Hollis phrases it. However, IBM has its own take on deploying and operating complex workloads such as business analytics. These may not be cookie-cutter appliances like a firewall or a Web server appliance. The tasks in question are too complex for that.

But they still bring together hardware and software from a single vendor and bundle them together. The marketing literature legitimately couches this integration in terms of customer benefits such as optimization. But such bundles also, and certainly not incidentally, increase a vendor's footprint and reduce the opportunity for others to capture a slice of the pie.

NEW YORK--It was a larger and cheerier crowd that attended this year's Red Hat's analyst day at the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday.

That shouldn't be surprising. At last year's meeting on October 7, Red Hat management had the dubious honor of ringing the closing bell on a day that saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average drop over 500 points.

This meeting took place in a time of what's probably best described as cautious optimism about the state of the economy. And in the context of Red Hat financial results that have continued to show growth at a time when so many companies in IT industry and elsewhere have not.

For the quarter ending August 31, its profit jumped 37 percent relative to the year-ago quarter, besting analyst estimates.

The day included a fair bit of discussion related to financial minutiae, as you'd expect for an event pitched primarily for financial analysts. However, it also included an overview of Red Hat's strategy and its technical direction. Here are a few things that caught my eye.

Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat's CEO, spent a fair bit of time talking about what boils down to fine-tuning of its go-to-market execution such as:

• Value of subscription. This includes what he called "education and compliance," essentially a euphemism for getting people using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) without paying for it to purchase a subscription. It also encompasses improving renewal rates for those cases where RHEL has been preloaded by a system builder and bringing a greater focus to articulating the value of RHEL relative to free substitutes such as CentOS.
• Routes to market. This refers to a continued build-out of the channel so that system integrators and others who recommend and install systems for less sophisticated customers will specify Red Hat as part of their solution. This stands in contrast to how, historically, Red Hat was mostly pulled into accounts by technically-savvy users and IT departments.

The message I took away from this is that Whitehurst isn't looking to change Red Hat's direction in any major way but sees a fair number of areas where more focused execution could lead to financial improvements. Later in the day, we also heard that Red Hat is taking a more systematic approach to which products it allocates development dollars for work such as internationalization.

For his part, Paul Cormier, executive vice president of products and technologies, reiterated Red Hat's belief that virtualization (which should be taken as hypervisor in this context) belongs in the operating system. This argument has been in evidence for a while as my fellow analyst Stephen O'Grady discussed after last year's event. 

It stands in stark contrast to VMware's desire to make the operating system irrelevant. Or, to put it another way, VMware's ambition to make the VMware ESX and ESXi hypervisors the model for a new type of operating system. This is too fraught a debate to tackle here; I largely agree with Stephen's take in his post.

However, one of the interesting outcomes of this battle is that Red Hat has been cozying up to Microsoft, the other big gun on the "hypervisors belong in the OS" side. This includes Red Hat's announcement Wednesday "that customers can now deploy fully supported virtualization environments that combine Microsoft Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux."

This sort of interoperability is certainly a customer desire and both Red Hat and Microsoft can legitimately present it in those terms without anyone smirking. However, the enemy of my enemy is also my friend, at least up to a point.

I also took note that Red Hat finally seems to be making some progress on the management front.

The product in question is RHEV Manager (RHEV-M); it's covered in detail in this video from the Red Hat Summit in September and is currently being tested by customers.

One reason I think it's important is that Red Hat apparently, if belatedly, recognizes that it is. CTO Brian Stevens admitted that RHEV-M "has been a huge missing ingredient."

The one customer speaker at the analyst day was Dave Costakos of Qualcomm and he focused on his company's experiences with testing RHEL-based virtualization and the associated RHEV Manager which he describes as "hits the mark."

I caught up with Dave at a break to get a bit more detail. He told me that they wanted a Web-based interface, which RHEV Manager has. He also liked the integration with Active Directory and other directory systems, and the role-based access controls. He said that it could perform the provisioning operations that Qualcomm requires and otherwise meets their needs.

Management has historically been a relatively weak part of Red Hat's offering that was mostly focused on updating packages. This is really a reflection of the broader Linux and open-source ecosystem in general. Projects like Nagios and, more recently, GroundWork notwithstanding, management doesn't play well to the strengths of open source. It touches too many parts of an IT infrastructure and requires too much cooperative work with the vendors making the things that need to be managed.

It's reasonable to ask whether Red Hat is too late to win big with RHEV Manager and its associated KVM-based virtualization play. But it had to attack management from some angle unless it was prepared to just cede that area of differentiation and potential point of control to system makers and others.

Finally, no technology discussion today would be complete without at least a mention of cloud computing. Brian Stevens jokingly called it a "shiny thing that people are looking at how to monetize."

The cloud discussion covered several angles, not least of which was standardization efforts such as Deltacloud. Like most other standardization efforts, this focuses on what is often called Infrastructure-as-a-Service; Amazon EC2 and S3 are perhaps the best known examples. Stevens admitted that it's going to be much harder to define a standard set of higher-level services (platform as a service in the vein of Microsoft Azure) that are portable.

Red Hat's distinctive play in the infrastructure cloud essentially circles back to its approach to virtualization. In cloud infrastructure as imagined by Red Hat, the operating system matters in important ways.

That's because applications matter; indeed, applications are ultimately what matter most. And in on-premise computing, one of Red Hat's greatest values and differentiators is the vast number of certified applications that it runs. This certification matters to users because, if they encounter a problem, it means that they can call the application vendor to get support. Otherwise, they'd get a "sorry, that's not a supported configuration."

One can argue whether the software layering of which the historical operating system is a part is the most appropriate choice for cloud computing. Fellow CNET blogger James Urquhart dives deeply into this topic in a pair of recent posts.

However, whether it's the way it should be or not, it is for now. And for Red Hat to be able to enable users to carry the certification of applications into a cloud model is a significant differentiation.

I visited my dad in Maine over the weekend and, as is often the case, part of the weekend was devoted to "IT administration," aka attending to PCs and associated gadgetry.

While some of the time involved transferring photos among various devices, a decent chunk was devoted to working on a PC whose operating system had decided to irretrievably corrupt itself somehow, requiring a fresh rebuild. And, yes, it was Windows--Windows XP to be precise--but please don't try to tell me that this sort of thing never happens with your favorite OS of choice.

This story isn't about Windows; it's about the inherent complexity of PCs of all stripes with locally installed and administered software. And this, to basically look at photos, play solitaire, and read e-mail through a browser.

The frustrating thing to me is that we basically know how to deal with this problem. It just isn't implemented in anything approaching a widespread way. It's also an approach that various people have been bringing up off and on for years. Take this article by Rupert Goodwins from ZDNet in 2004.

This solution is delivering a hosted desktop over broadband to a client device offered as part of an ISP's service. In other words, for some additional monthly fee, you'd rent a thin client from Comcast or Verizon just as you can rent a DVR today. They'd give you a standard desktop image along with a profile that could be personalized (including your desktop background) and space for your user data. They'd back up the whole thing and would be able to restore to the standard desktop image in the event of problems.

The thin client doesn't even need to be a desktop. Mobile thin clients are also readily available. It would have no local storage--that is, no local hard disk to crash.

There are various wrinkles that service providers would need to work out--such as dealing with additional applications that users might want to install and drivers for locally attached USB devices such as printers.

But we, as an industry, know how to do this. Desktone is one company that offers what it calls Desktops-as-a-Service. Essentially, it sells software that enables enterprises and service providers to build a hosted desktop infrastructure.

Service providers can then resell these hosted desktops to others. For example, in April Desktone announced a deal with ICC Global hosting around offering cloud-based virtual hosted desktops based on the Desktone Virtual-D Platform to organizations in the academic, public sector, and mid-tier business markets.

So hosted desktops, which you can think of as a cloud-computing-oriented implementation of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) are real. They just haven't made it out to consumers in anything approaching a widespread way.

Such a service wouldn't be for everyone--or even most. Many are more than willing to trade off the sometimes frustrating complexities of a full-fledged PC for the flexibility it brings. (Although I do wonder if it wouldn't be interesting for a supplemental device intended primarily for browsing even in a house with one or more PCs.)

But it does seem to me as if the cable and telecommunications companies have fallen down when it comes to offering what could be a very useful service for many. And, not incidentally, one they could charge an additional fee for--something that they're never shy about doing.

VMworld, which took place last week in San Francisco, was hopping.

In fact, the number of attendees appeared to overwhelm many of the conference's educational labs in the early going. And the many vendors I spoke with at the event were happy about their booth traffic and the show in general. Now that I've had a bit of time to digest and distill three days of whirlwind activity, five points stick with me:

1. We're seeing virtualization--as technology, products, and solution sets--start to mature in many respects. Or at least the current phase of it. Fellow analyst Judith Hurwitz described how she "was left with the feeling that we are in between generations of technology at this year's VMworld."

For me, this conclusion comes out of the observation that there was relatively little on display related specifically to server virtualization that was fundamentally new and different. That's not to suggest a lack of vendor activity. Anything but. However, the activity largely took the form of new iterations and building out on existing templates.

2. Legitimate cloud computing was much in evidence. But, my, the cloud washing was fierce. Many, many companies offering management and other products relating to virtualized infrastructure were eager to present themselves as playing in the nebulously defined "private cloud" space.

VMware itself was as guilty as anyone. With the latest version of its virtual infrastructure product, now dubbed vSphere, already launched back in April, VMware's focus at the show tilted heavily toward cloud computing.

While there were a few specifics, such as vCloud Express, much of this took the form of forward-looking generalities. For example, VMware gave a lot of airtime to the notion of hybrid clouds that bridge private and public networks even though this is largely an architectural theory at this point.

3. So was anything both new and real? Yes. A couple things. One was I/O virtualization, which can be thought of conceptually as separating computing from I/O (network and storage connections mostly) and allowing that I/O to be shared and dynamically allocated. It's not really a new concept. Like many things, it has its roots in the mainframe and has, more recently, found a home in blade designs from the likes of Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM.

However, the current crop of products are intended to work with standard rackmount or blade servers. Xsigo uses InfiniBand-based technology. Virtensys, Aprius, and NextIO essentially just bring PCI Express out of the server. This is a relatively young technology area but one worth watching.

4. Client-side virtualization was also a hot area even with Citrix and Microsoft--in many respects the top dogs in this space--in semi-exile from the show.

It's an exciting and evolving landscape with many new approaches and products. This includes work on protocols to improve the user experience over network connections of different types; Wyse, once exclusively a thin client purveyor, is now heavily focused here. We're also seeing a general trend toward making more effective use of the processor and graphics resources on the client rather than making the server and network do all the work; Wanova is a start-up that made an announcement shortly before the show in this area.

5. My last takeaway is a sort of meta point. The way that we do computing is changing in rather significant ways and virtualization--together with its related but distinct cousin, cloud computing--is at the focus of that change.

This is fundamentally a change in how we operate computer systems rather than, say, how we write software for them. However, because it ultimately affects how applications get delivered and computing is accessed, it has far broader implications than for just data center operators.