VMware to Provide Cloud Computing Virtualization Tools

EWeek provides details on VMware’s move to provide cloud computing virtualization tools.

New VMware CEO Paul Maritz is planning to bring the virtualization company deeper into the cloud by providing the tools to create a virtual, flexible IT infrastructure for the enterprise and for hosting providers.

VMware is positioning itself to provide a layer of virtualization technology needed to create a cloud computing infrastructure.

When newly minted CEO Paul Maritz spoke to analysts July 22 following the release of VMware's 2008 second-quarter financial results, he told the audience that the virtualization company is moving into a new stage of its development that would include a vigorous focus on creating virtual environments for cloud computing infrastructures.

The fact that VMware, which is still considered the leading vendor of x86 virtualization technology, is developing virtualization for the cloud should not come as a shock. Maritz himself oversaw EMC's cloud division before moving to VMware and former CEO Diane Greene had spoken of moving virtualization from a mere consolidation tool to a technology that would bring a new level of automation and systems management into the data center, which then leads to a cloud infrastructure.

Based on the following, we can look forward to VMware making announcements on cloud computing (like Amazon Web Services) hosters supporting VMware’s new tools.

Cloud computing holds the promise of allowing enterprises to save money and resources by offloading some or all of their IT infrastructure to vendors that provide applications or software infrastructures that are delivered through the Internet. What VMware and other vendors are trying to do now is build out the infrastructure and applications needed to create a cloud environment.

"The VMware infrastructure technology has a lot of relevance both in the cloud itself by helping people build and operate clouds, but also as an onramp to the cloud that allows existing customers to easily migrate their compute loads outside of their environments and into the cloud and back again," Maritz said during the July 22 earnings call.

While Maritz, a former Microsoft executive who became VMware's CEO earlier in July, did not specifically indicate when VMware's new cloud computing technology would hit the market, it seems clear that the company will detail its efforts at the VMworld conference in September.

As server utilization increases, we’ll see if Intel’s Server processor sales slow.

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Green Your Data Center with a Low Power Server, Intel Atom Powered – 25 watts

As power costs increase more people are looking at performance per watt. Virtualization of high power servers has been done by many. Another new approach gaining momentum is low power servers.  The Register reports on a 25 watt server for UK hosting company Bytemark.

Intel UMPC chip enters service as server CPU

Madness or genius?

By Tony Smith → More by this author

Published Monday 21st July 2008 12:32 GMT

UK hosting company Bytemark has seen the future of servers and it's... er... a processor designed for tiny laptops and desktops.

Yes, we're talking Intel's Atom, specifically the 1.6GHz 230, which Bytemark's now using as the basis for what it claimed were its lowest-cost dedicated Linux-running servers yet.

An Atom-based box with 2GB of memory and a pair of 100GB SATA drives costs £45 a month to rent, compared to £60 for a unit built around an AMD Athlon LE-1620, 1GB of Ram and a 100GB hard drive.

Bytemark's Atom-based box: lots of empty space

Bytemark charges less to set the system up, too: £50 for the Atom box, £100 for the Athlon. Both CPUs are single-core jobs.

Part of the reason for the lower cost is the power saving: the Atom system consumes 25W in total - a lot less than the Athlon rig does, Bytemark's Matthew Bloch claimed.

Intel is going to do everything it can to protect its high margin server business, so you’ll find these Intel Atom based servers coming from non-traditional markets.

I’ve been looking at building my own home server using http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121342.  But, thanks to a friend who reminded Intel’s IDF is coming up in August, I am going to wait and see what he reports on at IDF.

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Microsoft’s Kevin Johnson Failed Test to Go Higher

There is tons of news out there on Micosoft’s Kevin Johnson failed leadership to acquire Yahoo. http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=kevin+johnson

The Mini Microsoft guys provide an insider view.

I'm really surprised. There was Mr. Johnson up on stage this morning during the Town Hall causing me to roll my eyes with his fake enthusiasm and now he's leaving Dodge. On the horse he rode in on 16 years back. I know he did a lot to pick up the pieces after the Vista-debacle and is probably due a good amount of praise for letting Win7 align itself to be on the winning trajectory, but I just never bonded with Mr. Johnson's leadership. And some of the projects he's interested in and driving just leave me cold (e.g., the upcoming MSN UI revamp. It puts the F in WTF).

Is he taking the opportunity to be CEO of Juniper? Is he the fall guy for Yahoo! being such a bumbling mess? Is his departure meant to make way for a big acquisition / merger?

As we consider the long race to succeed Ballmer, I was certainly worried that Mr. Johnson was at the top of the stack rank. No reason to worry anymore! And three of my favorite technical leaders, Mr. Sinofsky, Mr. DeVaan, and Mr. Veghte, all move up a notch. Hey, one less layer in the company. Throw all three of them in the running, eh?

Bottom Line: Kevin Johnson was given a task to grow the Microsoft Search business. He led the Yahoo efforts. The whole Yahoo efforts are an embarrassment to Microsoft. Kevin you failed the test, let somebody else give it a try. Next are Sinofsky, DeVann, and Veghte. Who will succeed Ballmer?

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New Competitors VMWare ESXi vs. Microsoft’s Hyper-V

ComputerWorld covers VMware’s new president, Paul Maritz, conference call to financial analysts.

VMware's new CEO says he knows Microsoft and can defeat it

Paul Maritz, a former top MS exec, says he is ready to take the big dog on

July 22, 2008 (Computerworld) VMware Inc.'s new CEO and president, Paul Maritz, took aim at his chief rival today -- Microsoft Corp. -- and told financial analysts that he knows how to beat that company, and that includes giving products away.

"The key when it comes to Microsoft is to neither rest on your laurels, nor get mesmerized," Maritz said.

Another key strategy in beating Microsoft, apparently, is to play offense. And that's what Maritz did on Tuesday, announcing during a conference call with financial analysts his intention to start giving away VMware's ESXi server. That software is roughly equivalent to Microsoft's just released Hyper-V virtualization server, which lists for $28 per server.

VMware will "take the price on that product to zero" in its next update, said Maritz. ESXi had listed for $495 but is offered for much lower prices by third-party server vendors that include the product in their own wares. VMware officials said after the call that the new release would be out in about a week.

As I mentioned in my own post on July 8, Paul Maritz is a force Microsoft will reckon with and he knows how to compete.

Paul was one of the best Microsoft VPs I enjoyed working with, and I believe he'll be able to take VMware to a new possibility of cloud computing and virtualization.

The ComputerWorld article continues.

The contrast between Maritz and recently ousted VMware co-founder and CEO Diane Greene was interesting, and it quite possibly gives a sense of the company's strategy going forward.

Greene rarely said anything publicly that could be interpreted as confrontational with Microsoft, even though she knew that the software giant was taking direct aim at her company. VMware, particularly in its earlier years, wanted a strong relationship with Microsoft as it built its x86 virtualization platform, and so Greene would often position her company as a partner of sorts.

That era of niceness may be ending with Maritz.

Maritz today made a point of telling analysts on the call something they no doubt already knew -- that he is a former Microsoft employee. "I know that Microsoft is a formidable but not invincible competitor," he said.

And Maritz knows firsthand just how powerful Microsoft can be. Microsoft, thanks to its free browser and operating system market strength, crushed Netscape; Maritz was one of the leading Microsoft executives to testify for the company in that antitrust battle with the U.S. government 10 years ago. The question is whether that deep knowledge will give Maritz the competitive edge he will likely need to keep Microsoft from repeating history.

"I know that Microsoft can afford to play a long waiting game, but I also know from firsthand experience that where a competitor has a lead and that a competitor invests and innovates to stay ahead ... they can be very hard to catch, even for Microsoft," said Maritz.

One of the things that Microsoft made the biggest mistake was not coming up with the money to buy VMware.  Microsoft went cheap and bought Connectix, the #2 player in virtualization, instead of VMware which was a lot more expensive.  Microsoft has given the opportunity to EMC, and EMC’s management was smart pushing out co-founder Diane Greene.

I wonder if EMC bought Paul Maritz’s company with the full intention to put him in charge of VMware.  What do you think?

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Ken Brill Promotes CADE Metric in Forbes.com

Ken Brill has a commentary written in Forbes.com promoting the use of the CADE Metric.

I define a green data center as delivering the most productivity for the least amount of energy consumed. Will Forrest of McKinsey & Co. and I have defined a measure we call the Corporate Average Datacenter Efficiency (CADE) as being a useful--and, currently, the only--metric for measuring the combination of data center productivity and energy consumption.

CADE, while not perfect, divides overall data center efficiency into four individual measures, each of which can be separately measured and benchmarked. These elements include measures of IT asset efficiency and utilization as well as the asset efficiency and utilization of the physical facility that houses these assets. (You can read the report here.)

Nothing really new in this article. 

There are some experts who have opinions on CADE, but no one has stepped up with an alternative view.

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