With the recent launch of HP Helion, and with HP Discover coming in a few weeks, it is a good time to talk about the difference between private cloud and virtualization.

Interestingly enough most companies assume that because they have virtualized 70-80% of their applications they have deployed a cloud environment.  This is the unfortunate result of marketing and sales people trying to move products or ideas without having an understanding of where we are headed, and what is happening in the market.  I confess I am guilty of this to some extent, I have written about private cloud being virtualizaiton, which is correct but incomplete.  So just what is the difference?  Well that largely depends on who you ask, but here is my take.

Application Centric

Virtualization came about to fill a gap in technology.  We were at a point where servers were more powerful than the applications, and so there was a great deal of wasted space.  When VMware started their server virtualization line, the big value was consolidation.  There was little to do with applications, it was about server consolidation, datacenter efficiency, and moving the status quo to the next level.  The application were only impacted in that they had to be supported in a virtual environment, but high availability, performance, everything was managed at the virtual server level similar to how it was managed at the physical server level previously.

In the cloud, abstraction is done at the application level rather than the server level.  the cloud rides on server virtualizaiton, but ideally applications should scale out, using multiple servers in a cluster each doing the same function with manager nodes to direct traffic.  While this may seem less efficient, since there needs to be multiple nodes to operate a single application, it actually frees the application from needing to reside in a specific datacenter or on a specific host, and indeed it should span multiple of each.  It also enables rapid scaling of applications since rather than adding additional physical CPU or Memory to the virtualized systems, you simply spin up additional resource nodes, and then when the peak demand is gone, you can tear them down.

So the first difference between virtualization and private cloud is the focus on applications rather than infrastructure. As we continue to explore this, I hope to tie this together and help to explain some of these differences.

“Leadership is a choice. It is not a rank.” — http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_why_good_leaders_make_you_feel_safe/transcript

If you haven’t seen the Ted Talk on leadership by Simon Sinek, this is a must see. I do enjoy watching these, but usually they are not this impactful. “Leadership is a choice”. So why would anyone choose to lead when it is so much easier to just follow the rules, get promoted, and become a manager, and what does all this have to do with technology and things that interest me, and hopefully you.

Sitting at breakfast with two friends, one in sales, one in pre-sales, we were talking about what it would take to be really great at our jobs. We came to the conclusion that the great tech sales companies generate excitement. If you remember the 80’s, Pontiac had a successful ad campaign around We Build Excitement They did not build excitement BTW.

What we need in the IT industry are motivational speakers. No one likes when someone comes in and does a powerpoint product pitch. I have actually seen people fall asleep in such sessions. Not ideal. In order to lead, we have to get in and generate some excitement, show people why the technology is exciting for them. Instead of trying to make products that fit our customers environments, we need to build the products that our customers don’t know they need and get them excited about following us on the journey. We are changing an industry here, imagine if Steve Jobs had made the phones most people wanted. Instead he came out with a product no one wanted and created a culture around it and an entire industry was born.

So my challange to you, look at your vendors if you are a customer, look at your products if you are a vendor. Are you excited about what you are selling or what you are buying? If not, maybe you are not talking to the right people. Don’t buy a product because it is safe, don’t buy based on what you have always done, take some interest, get excited, and buy ino a strategy.

When VMware introduced some of the storage API’s, some of the more important ones were around storage. I don’t say this because I am a storage guy, but more because this is an area that frequently causes problems for virtualization. When VMware released their backup API, features such as Change Block Tracking, CBT, became particularly compelling. Now vSphere could tell the backup software what had changed since the last backup, rather than relying on the backup catalog to look at everything. This created less reads on the storage, and more effecient.

It was not a huge leap then when vSphere replication was released as a standalone product separate from Site Recovery Manager, SRM, as well as a function of SRM. Prior to this, vSphere would rely on the underlying storage to do the replication, but now replication could be handled by vSphere itself.

One of the challenges with replication has traditionally been bandwith. To handle this we have used compression, caching, deduplication, and sending only the changed data to the remote site. When VMware introduced CBT for backups, this enabled them to later release replication using the CBT technology since they were already tracking changes and could use those for replication as well as backups. This would like like the diagram below.

In the previous post, Software Defined Storage Replication, the discussion was around abstraction through a third party product, in our case the HP StoreVirtual VSA. In this case, we are looking at a built in product. Much like VSAN, this is a solid way of doing things, but the challange comes in because it only replicates vSphere, unlike 3rd party products.

The other consideration here is the efficiency of doing things in software versus hardware. Of course the abstraction does have efficiencies from an operational sense, management is built in to the vSphere console, and you are not tied to a specific storage vendor. On the other side, we do need to look at the inherent performance benefits of replicating between two block storage arrays. Anytime we do anything in hardware, it is going to naturally be faster.

One thing VMware has done very well is providing solutions based in software to compete with hardware vendors. This does not mean that VMware does not partner with hardware vendors, but for some customers the price is right for this. VMware almost always tells us to use array based replication for maximum performance, but this is a good solution for abstraction or a smaller environment where cost is a larger factor over performance.