Virtualization software company VMware held its VMworld event this week in San Francisco, marking what would seem to be an important milestone in the development of virtualization – particularly in terms of the popular understanding of the concept.

 

Outside the especially-privy industries – software, hosting, etc. – virtualization has yet to foster any widespread understanding. Up until very recently, that is. The fairly well known story involves VMware, the virtualization innovator filing its IPO approximately a month ago and raising approximately $1.1 billion, the largest tech company IPO since Google’s.

 

And VMware’s stock has been rising since the IPO, reaching $82.75 at one point on Tuesday (it closed lower). According to an Associated Press article, VMware’s market value is close to $30 billion, putting it behind Microsoft, Oracle and SAP as publicly traded software companies go.

 

Those kinds of numbers, needless to say, get the investment folks interested. Even those without a vested interest in virtualization. All of a sudden, there is big increase in interest in VMware, and subsequently a lot of interest in virtualization.

 

And now VMworld, the company’s annual conference. Last year’s attendance: 6,700. This year’s: about 11,000. More than 200 booths. A tremendous amount of media coverage – there are hundreds of news articles about “VMworld” from this week in Google’s news search.

 

That attention isn’t reserved exclusively for VMware. No doubt, the company is the concept’s de facto standard bearer. But VMworld, this year, is showcasing virtualization to the world of curious investors – and that includes the other virtualization vendors, large and small, in attendance.

 

One of those is Web hosting’s own virtualization stalwart, SWsoft, which said this week it would be bringing the beta of version 4.0 of its Virtuozzo software to the event to demonstrate some of its new capabilities.

I've got a few more posts to make following the SWsoft summit last week - Internet lawyer and WHIR blogger David Snead made a pretty excellent presentation; I had a very interesting conversation with Microsoft's Michael van Dijken regarding the company's SaaS Incubator program; and there were a few other interesting bits and amusing curiosities.

I'll have it wrapped up, I expect, in time for next week's ISPCON, from which WHIR writer Justin Lee will be blogging. Check the "WHIR Happenings" blog (located here) next week for posts from ISPCON.

On to the matter at hand.

And by the way, I would hope that the volume of posts dealing specifically with material from this event doesn't come off as a very vocal personal endorsement of SWsoft the company as much as maybe the natural result of the fact that there were quite a few interesting ideas floating around at this event.

On Tuesday, SWsoft director of hosting market sales Mike Riolo gave a presentation on business models for virtualized hosting. In one of the more purposefully inventive discussions, Riolo set out to offer some new ideas for Web hosts looking to make money from virtualization.



The point seemed to be that while virtualization (in this case, Virtuozzo) can be (and is) used to deliver VPS hosting, the fairly limited approach taken by many of the hosts in the "VPS hosting" market leaves a whole world of possibilities off the table.

The typical VPS hosting arrangement, he says, is three-or-so virtual server offerings of increasing resources and increasing price. But how many customers really go for the larger VPS package? Not exactly a rhetorical question, but the answer is supposed to be the fairly obvious "not nearly enough to make this particular business model necessarily the most profitable implementation of virtualization."

In general, his advice was that a host should be looking to move up the value chain with regard to each of its customer relationships - not exactly a revelation in terms of Web hosting strategy. But his specific advice with regard to using virtualization to propel a hosting business in that direction was the unique and interesting part.



He described a managed VPS hosting model, designed to serve a small-business customer base that knows what it wants in terms of service, but not necessarily in terms of resources. A managed VPS, in this case, is 50 virtual environments on a single machine, each going for about $20 per month. Around those accounts you could offer additional services, at an additional charge. Backups in excess of whatever basic amount (maybe 10) included in the plan, for instance, could go for $2 apiece.

Putting some sort of business-specific software on one of those virtual environments, and delivering it as a service could increase the value of an offering exponentially. Providing a customer with some kind of service means that you're holding their information for them, which means a higher attach rate.

Mix it up. Create a bundle of services that each occupies a virtual environment on a given machine, and then sell that machine and bundle of services, managed, as a package.

Ultimately, the point of the discussion that virtualization can be used to deliver much more than just standard hosting resources chopped into pieces.

TAGS: swsoft, virtualization

Webhosting Day, as you are possibly aware, ended last week. But the thoughts continue. Particularly those that have yet to be written and published.

One of the most impactful presentations of the first day of the deceptively two-day event was the keynote by Serguei Beloussov, SWsoft's CEO. I tend to watch presentations by Serguei, and a few others in positions similar to his, with one eye on the content of the presentation, and one eye on the context. I find that considering, alongside the message, what the motivation behind that particular message might be can lead to interesting revelations about the business. Or somtimes more questions.

The Content:

In this case, it was right in the title: "Hosting 2010 - OPEN FUSION as a Platform for the Success of Hosting Businesses." Like quite a few of the presentations at Webhosting Day, the keynote was more than a little bit of a sales pitch for SWsoft's Open Fusion (arguably enough to make it worth watching for the hosts in attendance. That's not really my point).

The basic premise was that by the year 2010, SaaS isn't going to be a choice that software vendors or hosting providers make, or a philosophy into which they buy. It will just be the way things are. Delivering hosted applications will simply be the job of a host. Certainly not an outrageous claim, in my opinion.

In SWsoft's world, application hosting is made profitable venture by automating, virtualizing and standardizing the infrastructure behind those applications. And, of course, SWsoft happens to have some solutions for automation and virtualization, and a platform for standardization, that you might want to look into.

The Context:

Making the case for SaaS is an obvious objective for SWsoft. Its products are designed with the delivery of hosted applications in mind. And a host could certainly do worse than to build its platform for application hosting out of SWsoft parts.

One thing I found very interesting was the fact that SWsoft (along with Microsoft and several other presenters) was so determinedly evangelizing SaaS.

The people who sell hosts their infrastructure, and the people who invest in the business, and the analysts who advise those people who invest, have been sold on SaaS for a while. And given the amount of material I see coming from that direction, I've become convinced, in particular, of the enthusiasm for the hosted application delivery model around the Web hosting business.

But SWsoft's presentation would seem to indicate that the enthusiasm isn't all the way there among the Web hosts themselves, at least in SWsoft's opinion. Could it be that I've heard the SaaS sales pitch enough times that I've begun to assume there's a level of acceptance that isn't quite there?

During the question and answer period, Serguei asked the audience (of roughly 50 people) how many of them were currently offering hosted Microsoft Exchange (which I perceive to be the sort of default entry-point for offering hosted applications), and one person put up his hand.

Is this a discrepancy between American and European markets? Maybe not. It seems like a similar amount of SaaS evangelizing takes place in North America.

So how far are we from hosting providers in general getting excited about SaaS, and building application hosting into the services they provide?

TAGS: webhosting day, SWsoft, Serguei Beloussov, saas

Saw this story from yesterday, referring to the contents of the latest IDC report on virtualization and multicore servers.

According to the article (I haven't seen the IDC report itself), the new material contradicts certain earlier reports that had been enthusiastic in forecasting sales and shipments of x86 server equipment.

More interestingly, the new report, "Virtualization and Multicore Innovations Disrupt the Worldwide Server Market," discusses the impact that that virtualization technology is likely to have on the market for X86 servers. The report says multicore and virtualization will cost the x86 market more than 4.5 million shipments and $2.4 billion in customer spending between 2006 and 2010.

IDC's report goes on to say that server virtualization will lead to increases in other areas of the server business, as IT managers relying on virtualization look toward more powerful equipment that can be more reliably divided up in terms of processing power, storage and other features.

Analysts, these days, seem to generally be on the lookout for something optimistic (or glaringly obvious) to say. And it can sometimes be difficult to parse it all, particularly with a contrasting opinion available in many cases (the story in the link includes contrary remarks from a Forrester Research analyst).

Common sense might reasonably lead somebody to believe that virtualization technology, which can enable a single server, in a wide variety of settings, to perform the work of several servers, might have an impact on the overall sales numbers in terms of server hardware. And that impact would, logically, be in the direction of fewer physical servers needed, fewer servers required.

But then, I don't pretend that my basic analyzing capabilities make me some sort of analyst.

One similar cause-and-effect outcome I'll be interested in seeing results from is the impact that some of the new emerging grid computing technology (particularly in the more Web hosting specific environments) might have on server sales.

We've discussed in the past how older servers - equipment that might not be up to the typical dedicated-server task - can be useful in constructing grids for delivering utility-based computing. Prolonging the usefulness of older machines will have an obvious impact on the server life cycle, which will no doubt have an impact on server sales.

As grid computing becomes more widespread in the hosting business, it'll be interesting to see how that impacts server sales, and how hardware makers adapt.

TAGS: virtualization, server

I announced last week that I was heading off to attend 3tera's Grid University. And I'll admit, I slacked off a bit. But I spent some time reviewing some of the introductory courses (archives of past sessions can be viewed online).

The courses are an unabashed advertisement for 3tera's AppLogic application platform. No surprise there. The whole project is intended to get people like you and I interested in 3tera's products, and so far, I'd say it's doing a decent job.

Class: Introduction to Grid and Utility Computing

This one's about as basic as you'd expect. It's sort of the long-form AppLogic sales pitch. A nine-minute explanation of the model 3tera uses to enable service providers to work with software as a service and Web 2.0 companies by providing them with use of a scalable, shared grid of resources.

I've explained the basic AppLogic outline in the past, and I'm probably better off not doing it again here. So I'll skip right to more of the informational sessions.

Class: AppLogic Applications

The demonstration discusses how to design, provision and back up grid applications ranging from simple control panels such as cPanel (specifically cPanel, in the case of this demonstration) to complex e-commerce implementations.

During the demonstration, the instructor builds a two-tier SugarCRM Web application (out of simple, AppLogic-packaged "catalog parts") with an input gateway, a load balanced Web tier, a data tier with databases and virtual NAS storage devices.

The process of building a simple (or complex, for that matter) applogic architecture is very similar to the process of creating a diagram of what one might build in the physical data center. Aesthetically, that's exactly the process.

An interesting security note - the only parts of an applogic architecture that has a publicly accessible IP is the user-facing gateway. Everything else is invisible (on account of its not existing in the physical world), and very difficult to attack as a result.

At about midway of this particular presentation, the instruction veers off into things like using command-line controls to assign resources to application components. Admittedly, things are starting to get a little bit over my head at this point, as my specialty is not the building and administering of application architectures.

So it's at about this point that I began to reconsider whether I wanted to remain in attendance here at Grid U. It didn't take long to figure out that I'm not going to stick around. But to be perfectly honest, the parties were lame.

Just don't tell my folks.

I think the speed with which classes did me in actually speak to the value of the content - that is, it's not a lot of PR or marketing talk. The sessions dive right into the technical details of operating the platform, which is probably what you're looking for, and exactly what would be lost in the translation if I were to repeat it here.

I don't think there's anything I can synopsize or communicate any better the sessions themselves can, except to assure you that, depending on your relationship to the architecture behind Web applications, AppLogic is pretty fascinating, either as a possible addition to your operations, or as a curiosity.

TAGS: 3tera, grid university

If you're a WHIR reader, you probably already know about 3Tera's "Grid University." Last week we reported that the grid hosting platform developer had launched a series of free educational sessions, and this afternoon we posted a feature discussing some of the thinking behind the project.

And it's quite an ambitious project - more than just a series of tutorials, it's a genuine set of live lessons, complete with question and answer periods.

But in the news-and-features format, it's difficult to answer certain questions that may be running through your mind, such as.

What, practically do I stand to gain by sitting through these sessions?

Well, fortunately, I've actually got a lot of history at Grid University. My father is a graduate. And my older brother was a starting shooting guard for the Grid U basketball team. So it was fairly inevitable that I'd end up enrolling. My first order of business will be answering that question posed in the last paragraph, as well as relaying some of the more notable ideas from some of the sessions and maybe recommending some particularly choice sessions for actual attendance.

I'll try to keep you up to date on campus life, too, and all the wild goings on.

This post, however, I'll keep brief. I enrolled a little late, and I have a lot of cramming to do to prepare for tomorrow's "Application Architecture and Development" seminar.

Oh, and selection Sunday is this weekend. And everyone is super excited about Grid U maybe making the tournament.

Go Golden Grid Devils!!!

TAGS: 3tera, grid university

On Friday, a colleague sent me a link to the Silicon.com weekly round-up podcast, the recently-introduced audio supplement to the site's long-running round-up feature.

(You can find the podcast in MP3 format here.)

The show itself is pretty amusing - a look at mainstream technology news with the same sort of flippant wit that pervades the Silicon.com site. They take a few stabs at the Windows Vista UK launch (apparently some stores stayed open overnight to facilitate a mostly-ignored midnight launch), an event that apparently featured the ultra-palatable sounds of British band The Feeling

(I hadn't heard of them until now. A sort of Supertramp-by-way-of-Coldplay mixture so blandly agreeable that it might have actually been written for tv commercials. Their myspace page loads one audio track and two music videos simultaneously upon opening, unleashing a mind-bending onslaught of dull, dull sounds.)

This leads the show's hosts to criticize "dodgy celebrity endorsement for technology products," a trend that includes the arrival of Apple's mac-vs-PC television ads in the UK, featuring British comedians Mitchell and Webb, who are apparently also famous. (Incidentally, those ads inspired this rant)

Finally, the hosts arrive at what they deem the most egregious of these "dodgy celebrity endorsements," and the real reason for my post, an appearance by reality-blurring character and actor Mr. T in a promotional video for Hitachi Data Systems.

They play audio clips from the video during the podcast, but the video is on YouTube, and it appears to be just a few weeks old.

I say "promotional video" because at three-and-a-half minutes, it's a little long for a traditional television spot. And its story is a little dense for a simple commercial. It's probably something else.

A group of IT zombies listens as a consultant insists "virtualization belongs in the network, never in the controller."

Fortunately, the T bursts through the wall, puts a stop to the consultant's jibber jabber, declares himself "the T in IT" and explains to the zombies that intelligence in the network is for suckas. Finally, he virtualizes them in a process that involves shooting lightning from his gold chain.

Pretty magical.

Highlight: "You know, you've got a lot of mouth. And I've got a lot of fist for your mouth."

The folks in the podcast seem to think it's pretty silly, which it is, and that it's some sort of embarrassing failure, which it isn't.

Sure, high-tech marketing jargon is even more jarring when it's being barked by B.A. Baracus. But it's also a hell of a lot more engaging. This was never meant to be a slick, polished production. It's meant to be funny, and it is.

I'm not sure if there's any standard by which the clip's success can be measured, as it was probably meant for internal use. But on YouTube, it has been viewed rougly 11,000 times in two weeks. And I definitely enjoyed myself.

Tags: hitachi data systems, mr. t