SxSWi 2011 – Views from the floor

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South by Southwest Interactive (SxSWi) is the premier event for web, social and interactive media, yet it is just as dynamic for networking. I have attended since 2008, and have found the off-site activities just as valuable, if not at times more so, than the panels themselves. This year’s SxSWi was only excepted by scale – such as the estimated 100% increase in attendance from 2010. I make a point of attending SxSWi to keep abreast of latest developments as well as [re]connect with the luminaries in the industry. My impressions from SxSWi were indelible – here are some of the more relevant bits: 

This is just the beginning:  If you think we are at the height of the maturity curve for digital and social media, guess again.  It is clear we are still in infancy.  A quick tour around the showroom floor brought that reality to the fore. One of the more intriguing sessions I attended featured Reed Hoffman, of PayPal fame, now Executive Chairman of LinkedIn, who described the future of the internet as an open platform where data *is* the platform. In Web 1.0 we took the first steps with online “presence” – largely anonymous users interacting with websites, browsing for information. Web 2.0 gave birth to online personas, with our identity  and relationships transferred online, along with the concept of targetted search, rather than browsing. This is the generation of mass data with a revolution of empowered online users. 

Web 3.0 is the next stage in this evolution, which delivers innovation around data. We presently experience considerable  levels of data exhaustion and information overload. Innovation is derived from making sense of this data,  and expressing its value to the user.  Today there are early instances of 3.0 – Mint.com pulls in your financial information, and provides a map of expenses.  Google has a data mash-up product called Refine, a tool for cleaning up and transforming unorganised data, in order to extend them to other web services. LinkedIn is working to use semantics to create a skills topology to mash-up with Wikipedia, for definition, which will assist job seekers in navigating the professional world, and identifying skills needed for certain roles and/or industries. Reed noted that in constructing the future of the internet it will be critical to think about what we are doing with data – how do we preserve trust of data and recognise that not all data is created equal.

Internet, television, mobile get cozy: It is likely not news to you that the internet, television and mobility are converging – the only way for TV to grow was to escape the living room. What is the impact of this?  I was amased at the number of attendees in a packed ballroom indicated that they have cancelled their cable or satellite provider, and are acquiring TV directly from the internet.  Also, significantly more users learn about new TV programmes from their social networks – principally Facebook and Twitter – than traditional TV and media advertisements? Intel’s futurist, Brian David Johnson, states how we are quickly moving towards more devices than people on the planet. As such, TV is no longer the TV of prior generations, but a display of choice to connect people socially, and with film and broadcast media – it is becoming a mainstream cultural connection. Thus, media now transcends single devices. We have just passed the tipping point with technology (tablets, smart phones, IPTV and set-top boxes, notebooks/netbooks) that can be connected together, and have content/storytelling weave seamlessly across each.  This not only impacts hardware product sets, software, applications and services, but marketing efforts to connect with customers along with methods to stay connected in our personal life.  

Good content creation becomes king: Barry Diller, Chairman of IAC/InterActive Corp, discussed the internet as a mass of data, and the shift towards journalistic content. Barry notes how the old media journalistic process no longer has a place in the present age – access to information is real-time. The name of the game is to produce relevant and engaging content real-time. He argues great content will produce winners and losers on the web, and that producing content that can be consumed on any device in an open platform is the “future”. 

CNN would state the future is already here, showcasing their new digital playground at SXSWi, with on the go programming options. As such, the role of the journalist will evolve from print, to real-time content, and storytelling that is ubiquitous. Barry states, “a great editor is a great editor no matter the medium.” Genevieve Bell, Intel Fellow, noted whilst the internet is not yet pervasive but that content is. For example in India, phones are not connected to the internet. So Indians bring their phones to a shop by a bus or train stop, to download content during their morning commute. Likewise, we will soon see journalists sought to fill digital marketing, media and interactive content jobs.  

Science Fiction is not fictitious: An interesting panel discussion yielded a compelling prediction – social capital will supplant brand equity as the measure of brand success.  There are 3 forces enabling this shift:
(1) Rapid rate of change – By 2025 compute power will be able to simulate human brain power.
(2) Overwhelming complexity of data, number of apps and social networking sites
(3) Technology that will evolve beyond the present, primitive state. 
Social media voices are something that marketers can no longer compete – a startling perspective being rapidly disappearing e number of inactive adult internet users (19%) in the US. Mike Spataro, VP of Enterprise Client Strategy for Visible Technologies, claims that social influence is the killer app to social capital.

What, then, is a person with social influence – this is someone that has greater than average impact through word of mouth.  We may not be able to compete with social capital, but we can leverage its power.  Currently there no standards defined for the influence of online customers, yet we can manually look at the relation of others in the community. The behavioural mapping of activity, relevance, reach and pull equates influence.  

Three to five years out is potentially the Holy Grail for marketers – a/k/a predictive analysis of social influence, which means behavioural mapping across various communities and channels, to predict certain behavior based upon your online persona. Dell currently measures social capital across domains both on and off .com, based on the concept that marketing requires adaptive customer centric strategies. They create a social presence map with credibility and reputation overlays, have listening software that directly feeds back product ratings and reviews to the product teams, and look at their content reach – which is currently more than the top 12 publications. They have a command and control center that responds and engages with customers.

What happens in North America doesn’t happen everywhere: I attended a session on “Going Big in Japan”, where I enjoyed a well defined overview of how starkly different online behaviour is in various countries and markets. One size does *not* for all. For example, Facebook is not big in Japan. Why? it requires one to fully identify themselves, and Japanese online users are less comfortable with association of their content with their full name. Twitter on the other hand has taken off astronomically, and likely will be more pervasive in Japan than the U.S – it only requires a handle to participate. Notable is how more than 90% of Japanese blogs are anonymous. Other notable facts include how young girls are principally connected via mobile devices, not notebooks or netbooks; and that Japan still has the top circulation of newspapers and magazines. The learning for all walks is to understand geo and country online behavior, not to assume translation of English content will work across the globe, and that one’s brand may need a cute character J.   

My principal takeaways are:

·        The future of the internet is the ability to make sense of and utilise the mass of data

·        Compelling, real-time content creation is key to online success

·        One size digital experience doesn’t fit all

·        The digital experience is now device- and display-agnostic, and ubiquitous

·        Social capital will supplant brand equity as the measure of success

·        Predictive analytics is the holy grail for marketers

Build it and they will come

Jevon’s Paradox is the proposition that technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource. When that increase is not accompanied by any more than organic growth in resource management, it can result in a resource crunch. Simon Wardley of the CSC Leadership Forum has often pointed out that, whilst cheaper operations costs and reduced capital spending should signal a reduction in TCO, the truth is quite the opposite. This argument is rather interesting on its own, but I see the greater issue for Cloud to be resource starvation. There are several parallels which reflect that, despite observed reductions in TCO, the resource crunch has resulted in both increased costs and reduced service. 

We have witnessed this effect in the mobile space, where mobile bandwidth has been consumed at an alarming rate with the emergence of data services. AT&T’s iPhone service in the US the last few years has only highlighted this, with the network brought to its knees in Manhattan, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and other major metropolitan centres. Advances in the utilisation of mobile network resources saw their near exhaustion in less than a decade. This has been accelerated and exacerbated by the common practise of planning infrastructure after the fact. Other regions have fared better, such as South Korea, Japan, and Europe, yet at the price of resourcing and implementing broad infrastructure projects. 

Will the Public Cloud be the next usage model that only increases resource consumption? The present rate of adoption, for example, by small businesses and social network games of Amazon Web Services, seems to suggest so. These are early adopters, yet the benefits of Cloud, together with these trends, are significant enough to strongly indicate only an increase in consumption.

Despite all the buzz to the contrary, compute and storage resources are finite, andnetwork resources continue to provide the principal bottleneck. Presently, dominant Public Cloud campaigns gloss over, or entirely ignore, this finite nature. The more compute, storage and network resources transform into utilities, the greater the exponentiation of consumption. Virtualization only accelerates the consumption rate, given the increase in server density. Without understanding this, increased Cloud adoption will be pursued with poor management of resources, and, resultingly, costs will increase to a point where they are uneconomical. 

Resource management will grow in importance as inter-connectivity and cloud consumption increase. Although billing and metering have developed to a certain degree within Cloud service providers, this has not been approached in a manner that would truly manage the use of resources. Much has been developed to support this at the virtualization layer, yet not at the service layer. Resource management aims to address this gap, by enabling actions to be taken with workloads based upon service level agreements and policies, resource profiles and how they map to workload execution within resource pools and individual nodes. 

This impacts both TCO and ROI. TCO can be maintained at a consistent level of efficacy through managing resource availability and constraints, to optimise the cost-vs-service ratio. ROI can be targeted and achieved through assurance of resource availability. Without resource management, costs can easily increase beyond efficacy, and pathfinding activities suffocated, as resources are heavily consumed and capacity exhausted. 

Whilst a high-volume, low-margin strategy suits a number of business models, those looking to the Cloud to execute their mission-critical or highly-regulated processing need more than an optimistic RAS model to assure their operations. Tenant visibility into the Cloud (more on this in my next post) combined with fine-grained resource management will make this actionable.

 

My interview with MSDN on Cloud

I was recently interviewed by Robert Duffner of MSDN on Cloud Computing for the Windows Azure team – you can read it in full at http://bit.ly/9jMHtC #cloudcomputing

Frustrated with dropped calls?

A new 4:1 telecommunications strategy and embedded processors from Intel mean fewer dropped calls for end users and cost savings for telecommunications providers.

You might have had this experience before: You’re on a phone call on your morning commute. In the middle of an urgent conversation, your call is dropped. Annoyed with your mobile carrier, you try to reconnect to your important call.

Download now or watch on posterous

3361_IDF-Comms-Workload-Consolidation.mp4 (22839 KB)

This common frustration is due to the increasing demand across the global telecommunications network. For instance, a series of brief text messages between you and a friend is a much larger workload than a phone call—or even a day spent connected to the internet via a traditional computer. This is because each text message must be processed as a signal processing package, including a unique connect and disconnect (just like an entire phone call) per text.

As demand continues to increase, many network service providers and telecom equipment manufacturers struggle to keep up with the overwhelming workloads and the rapid advances in communication network technology. In addition, different microarchitectures are deployed for different communication workloads, and a single network element, such as a router or a switch, will often contain multiple architectures. Multiply that complexity across the entire communication network, and service providers and telecom equipment manufacturers face greater development costs, the need for multiple development teams, and longer time-to-market.

Workload consolidation is key

To address these challenges in the communications ecosystem, a team in the Embedded and Communications Group (ECG) at Intel is working to reduce the number of architectures needed by each network element. According to Steve Price, Director of Intel’s ECG Performance Products Marketing, “providing a simplified architecture is a significant value proposition” for both Intel and communications customers.

The team is delivering on a strategy called 4-to-1 Communications Workload Consolidation. This means that they are working to move four different types of communications workloads—application processing, control processing, packet processing, and signal processing—onto IA.

Traditionally, Intel’s communication processors have primarily been designed for application processing workloads. “We win at application, hands down,” Steve explained. “That’s what we’re known for. Nobody does application better than we do.”

But with the recently released multi-core Intel® Xeon™ processor 5500 series (codenamed Jasper Forest), IA has moved into control processing as well. That has made customers like Huawei and Cisco take notice. With high performance and low energy demands (meaning less heat generation for form factors that are often too space constrained for many heat sinks or cooling fans), Jasper Forest has taken Intel from practically no footprint in control processing arena to winning 4 out of 5 major customers.

From 2-to-1 to 4-to-1

And the advancements don’t stop there. With the next generation, Intel will make significant traction in packet processing. Finally, a future generation embedded processor will then consolidate signal processing, as well.

Workload consolidation combined with the tremendous scalability possible on IA offers savings to customers in terms of development costs. Developers will only have to use one programming code base, and the simplified programming will mean that senior engineers can focus on creating nuance within the system rather than working on basic programming.

It also gives telecom customers the opportunity to create a “communication cloud computing” environment—a virtual environment where workloads can be moved or distributed evenly across equipment. Ultimately, this virtual environment will enable service providers to buy less equipment and still maintain a “load balance.”

This 4-to-1 communications workload consolidation offers a bevy of benefits for telecommunications providers and customers. So what’s in it for you? You get to look forward to a world of no dropped calls.

 

 

The Policy of Innovation

As a Technology Strategist, my charter is to drive bold technologies to transform my organisation, deliver world-class technical innovation, know the external research community, know my organisation, and provide technical leadership. I thus spend a significant amount of my time looking for how to achieve that transformation through “innovation”. With a smaller portion of my time, I present at a number of conferences on these strategies, their associated technologies, and how they can be applied to solve real-world problems.

One recent presentation was given at CloudCamp Hamburg. One of the reasons I chose to do so was to reach a new audience. The sessions at the event were quite good, focussing on developments in the business models, usage models and technologies of the Cloud. Yet, I read posts such as this one, and wonder that, based on my experience in Europe and the Americas, if there a) is a problem with the state of innovation in Europe, or rather, b) the taxonomy of innovation exemplified in the post is a problem in and of itself.

Anyone who has spent any time with me will know that I am not one for fussing about with taxonomies. I feel that, essentially, these are a tertiary consideration, and to be addressed after what I consider to be the ‘real work of taking a concept from idea to reality. My personal opinion is that taxonomies are pedantry, used to constrain, limit and control the process of innovation, and are too often used as a device to be heard, rather than to solve any problems of significance. Yet, when I hear or read the use of the word ‘innovation’ or phrase ‘big picture’ to focus only on business models, and ignore usage and technology, think there’s something amiss. If we limit ‘innovation’ to *exclude* usage and technology advances, we are truly advancing style over substance.

Most of the widely recognized innovations in history which have advanced the standard of living for many in modern civilisation arose from usage or technology innovation addressing very specific, detailed problems. The innovation may have encompassed a grand vision, but that vision arose from connecting the dots which started with solving a specific problem. To make the blanket claim that innovation is hindered by being too “busy nitpicking on time consuming details” makes as much sense as reality television. An artist worth the enduring attention of the public will need to have mastered the fundamentals of their craft; a reality ‘star’ will exit the spotlight in relatively short order (although not fast enough for some of us) since their recognition was purely situational, and they had not addressed any of the ‘time consuming details’ necessary to sustain any career in entertainment.

Based on my assumptions, the iPhone is 10% innovation and 90% evolution. The device has truly been innovative in its enablement of Augmented Reality – Apple improved a number of existing technologies such as touch screen, application integration and metadata management, to provide a usage model which was a step beyond the expectations of a mobile device. The innovation lay in how the individual technologies were deployed to provide a better (and now widely adopted/mimicked) usage model; the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Yet even the improvements in the parts, not to say new usage model, required a foundation rooted in time consuming details. Ask any Apple engineer working on any of the technologies that were developed or revised, and they can attest to how much effort – deep in the bowels of hardware, software and/or user experience engineering – was required of each and every one of them to deliver them.

The innovation of Rich Internet Applications (RIA), and subsequently the Rich Services Cloud – something with which I have been intimately involved – arose from similar efforts. The underlying engines supporting this, such as Flash, had already been widely deployed for nearly a decade, but it was the understanding of the limitations of Web 1.0, at the level of nitpicking on time consuming details, married with the vision for a rich yet agile development and user experience, that drove the development of platforms such as Flex and Apollo/AIR, Silverlight, and now HTML5/Chrome. Each of these implementations of RIA innovation recognised that the real world, devil-in-the-detail problems of Web 1.0′s fully remoted architecture were non-performant, did not scale, and limited the web experience to very simple, highly constrained models

Innovation is not in the vision itself, or in the nano-level details, but in how recognising the vision that can be realised from creating or enhancing bits at the level of time consuming detail, and successfully mapping them. Business across Europe may not have adopted North American-style Public Cloud, with its Lowest Common Denominator (LCD) user experience and generally coarse Service Level Agreements (SLAs), but that does not reflect their difficulty with innovation. Rather, it reflects that organisations across Europe have chosen to focus their energies solving some very important problems, after already bravely diving into related areas such as the Open Business Initiative wholly, and learning important lessons from such moves. Europe has proven itself truly innovative in business models, usage models, and technology, as exemplified in it’s world-leading or -challenging development in areas of mobile, automation, and web, to name a few. European organisations have not been shy to embark on bold endeavours to transform their business and usage models by developing, adapting or adopting innovative technologies.

Likewise, I’ve encountered plenty of innovation in North America arising from the unabashed confrontation of time-consuming-detail problems presented by the challenges of Cloud Computing. There have been plenty of clever applications of Cloud, but no matter how cool they may be, the real innovation, in my definition, is in the usage models and technologies that have enabled them together with a number of not-so-cool apps. Throwing something on the Cloud with a slick interface and a minimal SLA isn’t innovation. Developing the foundations for HTML5 and Native Client Libraries, developing MapReduce and Hadoop, developing image recognition algorithms that scale by shifting cycles across compute resources based on capabilities and utilisation  – these mapped to new business and usage models is innovation.

VMworld: It’s all about mobility

The one pervasive theme from this year’s VMworld has been mobility. Although the official positioning has focussed on server-centric models, the media and third party vendors have focussed on how workloads, compute and quality of experience can be moved across devices, using local resources to the fullest. Mobility is the emerging vector in cloud computing and virtualisation, and the reasons for this are clear.

Imagine you’re a new employee in the and it’s your first day on the job. You expect from past experience at other workplaces, that you’ll get an outdated PC, a desk phone, and maybe some training. You also expect that you may be staring at your cubicle walls for some hours before IT gets around to you.

Rather, let’s say you get a visit from your department admin. She hands you a voucher for, say, $1,500,  and a thumb drive. The admin explains that the voucher  is for purchasing the computing device of your choice, and the the thumb drive authenticates both you *and* your device to the network, where your OS and applications are waiting to be deployed to whatever device you may use.

Welcome to the mobile workplace. If you think this scenario is too far-fetched, it’s time to rethink. Technically, it’s already here.

Traditionally, mobility has meant carrying around a standardized, company-issued PC weighing 8 to 10 pounds, fully loaded with an operating system, a stack of standard applications – many of which you won’t use – and all your data. The more you carry it around, the heavier it seems, and it’s a never-ending chore for you and IT to keep your hardware and software updated, and your data secure.

True mobility, however, provides device independence combined with device targetting. This enables the applications and data to be deployable, employing isolation, to a variety of devices, and grants you access to them from wherever you are. For example, you would choose a device for your corporate work, your home notebook, smartphone, mobile Internet device (MID), etc. Virtualisation technologies would employ a container, provided by your corporate IT, that can run on any hardware that supports the virtualisation platform. IT manages the container, deploying IT applications and data to it on the device. The environment is protected because it runs within a virtual environment employing memory and I/O isolation. Employees could run the IT environment alongside personal applications and data on the same device hardware, keeping both environments safely protected from each other.

Mobility also requires ability to move workloads from device to device, based on immediate needs, and maintain task continuity, is critical to user productivity. Employees performing tasks on one device in transit often need to, or can benefit from, moving to another device at home, or the office. The continuity of performing those tasks requires that the workload be moved, or synchronized, to the other device when that device is accessed. Users can then seamlessly switch from device to device, keeping their tasks intact.

Two major emerging technology trends behind the concept are workspace virtualisation and the consumerisation of IT.

Traditionally, technology became available to enterprises first and spread to consumers later. But a reverse trend—consumerization of IT—is emerging rapidly. A variety of technologies are being adopted by consumers first, who then informally introduce them into the enterprise. As the consumer market explodes with new products—lighter and smaller notebooks, netbooks, and feature-rich MIDs─employees want platforms they’re familiar with from personal use. And they’re using personal devices for work. The reality for IT shops everywhere is that consumer devices are crossing over into the workplace in increasing numbers. This unavoidable osmosis poses a real challenge for IT departments to manage and secure the maverick devices.

In the traditional computing platform model without any virtualisation, the IT applications and data become entwined in the registry, file system, and even the hardware itself. This model is complex and expensive to manage. One of IT’s largest costs is device hardware support. For employees, the model is limiting too, with little choice of client devices and an inability to run IT apps and data seamlessly alongside personal applications and data.

With workspace virtualisation, the entire software environment—applications, data, and IT services—are moved to a low-overhead virtual container and “decoupled” from the underlying subsystems. It can be managed and updated centrally and distributed to a variety of device hardware devices. IT could configure different containers, and distribute them to different hardware platforms. There could be a standard Windows* container, a standard Linux* container, a purely Open Source container, a Software Developer’s container, etc.

The result of implementing consumerisation and virtualisation is a flexible, platform-independent approach that can increase employees’ choices and productivity and allow IT to focus resources on providing and supporting IT services, not on managing the platform.

Combining multiple emerging technologies, a number of vendors have used used standard corporate and consumer notebooks and desktops with Intel^® Core™ i5/i7 processors running Windows or Linux. At VMworld, RingCube demonstrated deploying workspace virtualisation technologies and policy management software, using Intel Virtualisation Technology™, illustrating that along with all traditional device functionality, workspace virtualisation was used to access IT applications over the corporate network from home and office locations, clearly illustrating the feasibility of mobility. For more information on the joint RingCube/Intel efforts, see the white paper “Hardware Assisted Workspace Virtualization“.

Multiple technology vendors have defined both strategies and products with the potential to transform the way IT delivers services, including Citrix XenClient, Wanova Mirage, Phoenix Technologies’ HyperSpace, and Parallels Workstation. Combined with the continued media feedback at VMworld 2010, it is apparent that the future is here with true mobility.

Is the operating system irrelevant?

In his keynote at VMworld 2010, VMware CEO Paul Maritz spoke of how virtualisation is radically rewriting the computing landscape, in that the existing IT model is being replaced by cloud based on virtualisation, and that IT will increasingly focus on delivering customised applications. ”This is the new stack, and we are in a transition from a client/server world to the stack of the cloud era…. One thing history teaches us is that there are winners and losers in moving from stacks. But something like this will happen if we are for it or not,” Maritz said.

This is but the latest in the trend toward operating system abstraction. Since viable virtualisation technologies arrived on the scene, models and architectures have shaped to serve varying needs. From type-1 hypervisors, to virtual workspaces, to rich services runtimes, the number of virtual applications have outstripped the installed base since 2007. Now, service providers have deployed vast virtual data centres, and companies investing in virtualisation are following suit in building their private and hybrid clouds – the latter in which tiered virtual machines are being created in third-party datacentres so that companies can scale to meet demand.

As virtualisation continues to expand, software practices have had to dramatically shift in kind. As the operating system abstracted development from the underlying hardware, and interpreters abstracted away from the operating system, the latest generation of platforms now abstracts away from the gory details that once dogged development and test alike. Maritz stated how ”There hasn’t been a lot of development in the operating system environment for 20 years. Now, a developer working with Ruby on Rails doesn’t need to care about what operating system is under the hood.” I would take this a step further – a developer working with HTML5, JavaScript, RoR, Flex/AIR or the rest don’t need to care about what application platforms or containers are under the hood. It is difficult not to agree with Maritz that old-style software development has no place in the new, virtualised environment. Rather, new applications are needed so that companies can meld new information flows into existing applications and meet client demand.

 

RingCube Unveils New Security and Performance Innovations for Desktop Virtualization at VMworld 2010

RingCube announced a series of enhancements to their vDesk Desktop Virtualization solution in security, performance, management and usability, which were developed in association with Intel. The capabilities introduced include:

• Hardened security features, including pre-authentication host checking, to protect against keystroke loggers; and granular logging for regulation compliance;
• Performance improvements to their MobileSync features, including compression of encrypted workspaces and block-level differencing
• Management and usability features that enable deployment of vDesk across the network faster; as well as higher levels of resiliency with improved architecture; and usability improvements for USB-attached printers.

RingCube is demonstrating vDesk solution on Intel vPro devices VMworld 2010 this week.

Learn more about Workspace Virtualization from Intel, CSC, Gartner Research, and RingCube at: http://www.DesktopVirtualizationOptimized.com

iPhone security breach highlights mobile, cloud issues

Per Jesus Diaz at gizmodo.com, downloading a simple PDF file can give hackers access to your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad. The security hole is applicable to all iOS 4 devices.

“The vulnerability is easily exploitable. In fact, the latest one-click, no-computer-required Jailbreak solution for iOS 4 devices uses this same method to break Apple’s own security…It just requires the user to visit a web address using Safari. The web site can automatically load a simple PDF document, which contains a font that hides a special program. When your iOS device tries to display the PDF file, that font causes something stack overflow…The result is that, without any user intervention whatsoever, that program can do whatever it wants inside your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad.” 

For the complete story, see Apple Security Breach Gives Complete Access to Your iPhone.

vFabric, the VMware Network OS, to be announced at VMworld?

http://wikibon.org/blog/vmware-network-os-announcement-at-vmworld-vfabric/

VMware Director of R&D Howie Xu will be presenting The Future Direction of Networking Virtualization at VMworld 2010 in San Francisco (9am Monday 8/30 and 4:30pm Wednesday 9/1) and Copenhagen.  In a preview video, Howie states that “VMware will be announcing an open, extensible networking virtual chassis platform, a Network OS or networking hypervisor, so that anyone can develop the on-demand networking service on top of vSphere.”  There will also be services built on top of the platform.

 

A recent VMware video suggests the company is about to jump into networking in a big way. Dubbed “vFabric,” This new offering would be a generic hypervisor for virtual network devices, from load balancers to security appliances, and would presumably be integrated with the existing vNetwork Distributed Switch functionality.

 

Most hypervisor products include an internal virtual network switch, but VMware’s ESX has multiple choices. The original “dumb” virtual Ethernet switch was augmented by vSwitch back in the ESX 3 days, bringing more-advanced configuration options.VMware improved and renamed the vSwitch in vSphere 4, creating the vNetwork Standard Switch (vSS). The introduction of vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS) in vSphere 4 really set VMware’s network capabilities apart.

  Howie Xu released a video discussing his sessions at VMworld, beginning with a quick pan past Xu’s whiteboard, and including a discussion of the state of the art, vision, and product and technology roadmap for VMware’s networking-related efforts.

  Xu talks about creating a “networking virtual chassis or hypervisor” to allow third-parties to develop and roll-out advanced networking devices within vSphere. VMware has already steamrolled through the heart of server-based applications, making VMware-based virtual appliances as common an installation format as the DVD. Now the company is turning its attention to the network.

  Xu speaks of both a platform and a service to support this ”open extensible networking virtual chassis platform,” and goes on to suggest that it could be used by “networking security, load balance, application acceleration, IP address management, and performance management” products. The virtual appliance marketplace is already populated by the familiar names in networking, from F5 to Bluecoat to Checkpoint.

  Networkers have been conditioned with the belief that custom silicon is the best way to achieve low latency and high performance for network devices. The same could be said of the storage world, where companies like HDS, 3PAR, and BlueArc pride themselves on their custom ASICs. But EMC, HP, and others are proving that Intel’s server-class CPUs and peripheral busses now have the guts to go head-to-head with custom silicon. The networking world is no different, with many newer companies basing their products around industry-standard hardware.

  But deploying these systems in a virtual environment is more challenging. Can a virtual machine hypervisor prioritize threads for network devices? Can it handle the overhead related to networking operations in real-time? What happens in the event of a DDoS or network flood? Most network devices run real-time operating systems like VxWorks or QNX to ensure packet throughput, but virtual environments are notorious for “overflow” of I/O or CPU load between guest machines.

  The whiteboard provides some hints as to how VMware will tackle these issues. First, note the term, “latency-aware queueing,” which suggests that a mechanism will monitor the hypervisor and alter the queues for virtual network devices as the load changes. As latency rises, the hypervisor can move workloads to different processor cores or even alternate hardware using vMotion. We also spot a reference to “non-blocking”, suggesting an asynchronous I/O mechanism will reduce the likelihood that one of these virtual network devices will have to wait for data.

  Both of these technologies are hallmarks of real-time operating systems (RTOS), and are critical to the design of scalable hypervisors like VMware’s ESX. It is likely that the company is developing an advanced hypervisor environment for these specialized devices.

  If these assumptions are true, then this is a remarkable development. One could see an entirely new and more-powerful ecosystem evolve around VMware vSphere, running virtual network devices in a quasi-real-time environment. vFabric will not destroy the larger network device market, yet expect wide vendor support for the concept, especially those involved in lower-end and remote-office applications.