August 23rd, 2007 12:14pm
tshafer
If you missed Ken Novak at LinuxWorld 2007 in San Francisco, here’s a summary and the slides. Ken detailed the strengths of Software as a Service (SaaS) as a business model in “How Virtualization Enables and Threatens Saas.”
- SaaS firms tend to have shorter sale cycles.
- SaaS is a pay-as-you-go business model where customers only pay for the services used.
- SaaS providers scale as the demand scales.
- Remote access from anywhere is built in, not an after thought.
SaaS lacks the software customization and integration that are available with traditional software. The trade-off with SaaS software is updated continuously allowing for rapid customer input and improvement. Additionally, traditional software supports a single tenancy model which is simple and clean.
Virtualization is succeeding in the market place because it offers lower cost, improved software management, and streamlined operations like backup, disaster recovery and load balancing.
An interesting application of virtualization is enabling utility computing. Virtualized utility computing handles the scale up and scale down for SaaS companies. As importantly, multi-tenancy management issues are now the responsibility of the utility company: the SaaS firm’s development and release environment now looks like a simple, clean single tenancy.
Here’s the full presentation: LinuxWorld07Slides
August 3rd, 2007 12:22pm
tshafer
Happy to note that one of our customers has reproduced their production active directory and their exchange 2003 server in a Replicate virtual lab, and is now rehearsing how to upgrade it to exchange 2007. They are dealing with many issues, like public folder migration, remote and wireless access, incorporation of third-party addons to exchange, and dealing with multiple sites, that resemble the issues their clients face, and are able to do it all with a real company’s worth of users and data. When rehearsing an upgrade, they generate two copies of the data store (one each under exchange 2003 and 2007). The email data store alone is over 70 GB, and each domain controller is over 10 GB, so the virtual lab will soon exceed 200 GB in size — our largest single vlab, and it kicks along nicely. It’s quite impressive to see the upgrade processes run in a completely repeatable and reliable way. Replicate’s virtual network, based mostly on FreeBSD vms, functions perfectly alongside Microsoft vms. It’s quite a demonstration of the strength of VMware’s virtualization technology as well.
For more detail on virtual testing of Exchange, visit Clone your Active Directory in 12 minutes using VMWare.
July 12th, 2007 06:36am
tshafer
Palo Alto, CA - July 12, 2007 - Gone are the days of annual release cycle. Software companies need to operate with rapid releases while maintaining high quality and tight integration. For Software as a Service (SaaS) companies, weekly releases are the new standard. Virtualization helps SaaS companies deploy their software faster and more flexibly. At the same time, it promises faster and simpler delivery of on-premise software, competing with SaaS. Ken Novak, CEO of Replicate Technology, is honored to speak about these emerging trends at LinuxWorld in San Francisco Aug 7-9, 2007.
LinuxWorld is the premier event for the Linux and open source community, bringing together industry leaders shaping the future of new enterprise technology in the largest single gathering of business and technical leaders deploying Linux and open source solutions.
About Replicate Technologies
The Replicate Rollout testbed is a hosted virtual service for a broad range of server, application and database environments. It saves time and money in software quality assurance, system integration, and ongoing software support. It helps cut software release cycles from months to weeks, and enables more customer-specific problem resolution, while lowering hardware and labor costs. It is provided on demand, in response to testing needs, without up front investment. Replicate is based on common virtualization platforms and supports nearly all X86 operating systems.
About LinuxWorld Conference & Expo
LinuxWorld Conference & Expo is the premier event exclusively focused on Linux and open source solutions. As the world’s most comprehensive marketplace for open source products and services, LinuxWorld provides business decision-makers with information and resources to implement Linux and open source solutions into business infrastructure and enterprise networks. For more information or to register for the event, visit the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo Web site or call (800) 657-1474.
About IDG World Expo
IDG World Expo produces tradeshows and events for professionals seeking world-class education, peer-to-peer networking and one-stop comparison shopping. IDG World Expo’s portfolio of conferences and events includes Entertainment For All™ (E For All™), Macworld Conference & Expo®, Next Generation Data Center™ (NGDC™), LinuxWorld Conference & Expo®, and LinuxWorld® OpenSolutions Summit™. IDG World Expo is a business unit of IDG, the world’s leading technology media, research and event company.
June 18th, 2007 06:22am
tshafer
PALO ALTO, Calif., June 18, 2007 Fat Spaniel Technologies, the leading provider of critical information services for renewable energy systems, has selected Replicates’s Rollout TestBed, after a thorough evaluation, in order to solve the problem of testing distributed applications in realistic environments. “Going live in real-time monitoring environments requires careful testing. By rehearsing the upgrade sequence in Replicate’s Testbed we cut our risk and allowed rapid upgrading,” says Brett Francis, Senior Director of Engineering and Architecture at Fat Spaniel Technologies.
“We have worked with a variety of enterprise, startup, and non-profit organizations who have extended their in-house infrastructure with our hosted service. Our customers love the “peace-of-mind from starting from a known good state” that we enable. Our “preserve” functionality allows the entire team to leverage and re-use “known good” VM models that key technical staff develop and preserve. Our patent pending networking capabilities allows a seamless path of rollout for physical upgrades,” says Ken Novak, CEO of Replicate Technologies.
About Replicate Technologies
The Replicate Rollout testbed is a next generation virtualization tool. It controls multiple Virtual Machines while providing accurate emulation of the WAN and LAN environment. It stores the combined configuration of a multi-system application in a database, which automates setup and tear down of testbeds in minutes instead of hours, and prevents corruption of testbeds during follow on testing.
May 8th, 2007 06:24am
tshafer
PALO ALTO, Calif., One early customer for the Replicate Rollout Testbed service is Eric Romero, Senior Applications Analyst at CGNET Services International, Inc. He commented, “Compared to using a physical testbed I think this has taken about 1/5 the time and allowed me to easily explore a number of potential configurations I just wouldn’t have had time to setup. I have been very pleased with the level of support and responsiveness of the Replicate team, and with the capabilities of their testbed environment.”
Georg Lindsey, CEO at CGnet observed “One key benefits of the Replicate service is that other technical staff members will be able to leverage and re-use a number of the configurations that Eric built. Replicate allows us to save and re-use his work.”
Eric Romero added “The challenge with coming back to a physical test bed for do additional testing is that you are not always certain what state it’s in. With Replicate, I have the peace of mind that I know the copy I saved was in a known good state. Also, I can checkpoint save before trying a new configuration and if I don’t get it right the first time, I don’t have to re-build my environment, just copy back a known good version. My time to get a new clean setup went from 3 hours to 5-10 minutes.”
About CGNET
CGNET Services International helps nonprofit organizations address human needs by providing them with comprehensive and reliable communications, anywhere in the world. CGNET does this by designing, implementing, maintaining and evaluating communications networks.
CGNET is a privately held company with its headquarters in Menlo Park, California, and people on the ground on four continents. Since its founding in 1983, CGNET has interconnected international organizations at more than 300 locations in over 130 different countries, including some of the most difficult-to-network locations on Earth. URL: http://www.cgnet.com/
April 26th, 2007 10:18am
ken
We are sometimes asked why a development or operations or support group would employ a virtual testbed like Replicate’s. Wouldn’t they insist on a physical testbed? In fact, our customers have come to prefer the virtual testbed. The reason takes a little explaining.
In our experience, the biggest fidelity problems in testing come from variations in the state of the system during testing. Ideally, testers use one server for each production server, and they reimage each machine before each test session. But there is rarely enough hardware available for this, and reimaging machines requires many steps and a lot of time. So most tests and operation rehearsals take place with the testbed that is at hand. It may involve one server that combines the functions of two or three, or it may be in a state that was left over at the end of the previous test. This can introduce false problems, and cover up problems that would become visible if the testing was done from a multi-machine consistent state.
Replicate’s fast and automated setup allows testers to control the most important variable, the state of the machines and their software. Multiple machines are always on tap, and they always start in a known state loaded from a library that contains any number of stored configurations. This eliminates the biggest sources of unknowns. We think the unknowns introduced by virtualization are extremely small by comparison.
And as a bonus, testing is done more thoroughly and more often. Operational upgrades can be repeatedly rehearsed with enough machines and realistic configurations on tap. Post-installation support issues can reproduced more often and with much less effort. Virtual testbeds can be valuable through an application’s full life cycle, in a way that physical ones can’t match.
April 26th, 2007 10:16am
ken
Quick items about virtualization adoption:
IDC: Server shipments slow on spread of virtualization: “the x86 server market revved slightly in Q4 2006, growing 7.0% in the quarter to $7.2 billion worldwide, its fastest in five quarters, but unit shipment growth continued to moderate with growth at 1.1% year over year to 1.85 million servers, as customers continued to consolidate their IT infrastructures, .. For the first time in more than 10 years, average selling values in the quarter increased year over year as IT managers move to consolidate IT workloads. This shift toward a shared compute infrastructure is driving additional scalability, memory attachment and I/O needs, which in turn, lead to higher average selling values.” So IDC believes that virtualization has spread enough to slow server purchase counts, while simultaneously increasing the CPU and RAM demanded from each server. Makes sense.
TechComparison - Linux Virtualization Wiki: Interesting comparison chart of virtualization technologies. Another chart from David Strom. Also: a story of a satisfied Xen user.
When to use VDI, when to use server-based computing, and how the Citrix Ardence desktop fits in: Long and thorough article comparing the different desktop models. Also profiles Ardence virtual disks, an “iSCSI-lite” for non-persistent disks that can be delivered for PXE boot as well as run time read.
February 19th, 2007 12:31am
ken
I’ve been a fan of John Sequeira for years. He’s a Boston-based consultant and O’Reilly author who has been way ahead of the curve on virtualization. I remember learning about x86 virtualization in 2003, and thinking about how good virtual appliances might be, when I came upon his September 2001 article that laid it all out. That article included a downloadable VMware vm with the OpenACS content management system — as far as I can tell, the first application-level virtual appliance anywhere.
So I was very interested in his posts last month discussing virtual lab management and hosted virtual machines. Again I like his train of thought. He defines lab management, and thinks about its future:
“when you have a testing environment that consists of many machines acting in tandem, and you need to build up the cluster, test it, and tear it down and restart it, many times and in many different configurations. Covering your test matrix for distributed applications/SOA is hard, and Lab Management is ridiculously easier than the alternative. Lab Management will remain inside the enterprise…”
Naturally at Replicate, where we provide hosted lab management, we think of lab management as a broader need, spreading far beyond the traditional large enterprise. We see labs and testbeds in use in system integrators and consultants, in online service providers, and in technical support groups, all of which need to work with multiple software configurations to reproduce and work around problems, to test new code, or to integrate new packages. We are finding customers that prefer to buy access to virtual labs on demand, rather than pay high startup costs for their own managed lab, plus hiring or training in-house staff to keep the lab current. And as John predicts, we do cost more than the $70/month for raw virtual machines, but not by all that much
John’s main point was to review two large-scale hosted vm offerings, Amazon’s EC2 and the just-funded Qlayer. Both aim at large-scale applications in production, while Replicate focuses on groups of 5 to 50 virtual machines in test lab environments. We’re finding traction with this focus, where our customer gets large benefits without making a big jump in their infrastructure. At least one customer is using our service as a gentle introduction to virtualization — immediate benefits for test and dev, with no fixed cost, while building the virtual machines that could move in-house or into production in the future.
One other point: John emphasizes the “composability” of the virtual machines, and the need for ”making sure all the ports/network address/authentication/file paths etc line up.” We call that meta-info the “application topology,” and modeling and applying it to virtual machines is at the heart of Replicate’s technology. More on that in a future post.
January 25th, 2007 06:40pm
ken
Enter any data center and you’ll see a variety of boxes. Most are servers, and most of the rest are “network devices” that are single-function devices for translating and directing flows of bits: switches, routers, firewalls, load balancers, VPN concentrators, compression engines, access controllers, e-mail filters, multiprotocol file servers, and more. These are appliances in the classic sense: pre-defined function, closed operating system, quick installation (usually!) — the opposite in these respects to the applications that run on servers.
The simple installation and operation are clear upsides. Others have listed the downsides of hardware appliances, and they apply here as well: issues when scaling up or down, issues with spare parts and data backups, and clumsy element-by-element configuration changes. Yet for all but switches, their functions can be reproduced in servers with 2 or more network interfaces (NICs) and, usually, open source software. So it’s no surprise that they make popular virtual appliances. In fact, most of the winners of the VMware virtual appliance challenge were network-oriented devices.
A notable example of a classic network appliance going virtual is the Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager. This is a high-quality load balancer with many extra “layer 7″ functions to route, filter, and cache traffic for web and application servers. It was built on a general-purpose Linux core, and is sold as a hardware appliance. Now it has been released as a virtual appliance. We’ve talked with our prospects here, and they are intrigued: they like the flexibility of starting off with a load balancer, and doing early application testing with one, and being able to smoothy upgrade to a dedicated hardware appliance as their load grows. Other companies whose products have similar values are the Open Source Router from Vyatta, Reflex VSA for intrusion detection, LoadBalancer.org, and Proofpoint’s email filter. (If you know others, please feel free to submit the name and link in the comments to this post.)
None of these will run as fast in a vm as they will in an engineered hardware appliance, where they could conceivably achieve wire speed of 100 mbps or even 1 gbps, instead of a vm’s more typical 25-50 mbps. But then again, it’s rare that most applications ever see that much demand for their services — under 20 mbps is more typical. In fact, there are cases where the traffic from many applications are forced through a single hardware appliance “because it’s there,” when a more logical network topology would separate the traffic and give each application its own appliance. For example, firewalls sometimes have extremely complex configurations because they manage security for many different applications in a single box, when they could be more easily managed with one firewall per application. Disaggregate the traffic and you may reduce complexity and configuration errors, while lowering the traffic rates to levels more suitable for a virtual appliance. As cores become more numerous in servers, it may become more appealing to use them for network functions, replacing hardware and cabling with software.
I’ve seen some data centers where the “network guys” and the “application guys” are different tribes and hardly understand each other. The network guys generally buy and wire up boxes, while the application guys mostly buy and configure software. It’s a little like the old days, with telephone and PBX guys separated from the computer guys (though not as bad, thankfully). The new options for network functions in virtual appliances could cause another wave of convergence, both in the equipment and the staffing in the data center.
January 25th, 2007 06:39pm
ken
The figures are surprisingly high. From October 2006: “Server virtualization no longer has the same cache it did a year or two ago. And the reason is simple: Now that everybody is starting to do it, there is nothing to boast about. According to IDC, more than three-quarters of companies with 500 or more employees use virtual servers, and 45 percent of all new servers purchased this year will be virtualized.” And VMware leads. Revenues are up 6X in 3 years, and “more than 20,000 companies now [use] VMware technology, including 99 of the Fortune 100 companies.”
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