The Converging Network

Power IT Down Day + Call To Action To Create Greener Products

Yesterday I recorded a podcast about Power IT Down Day. I'll be posting the podcast to my Network World Converging On Microsoft Podcast first part of next week. Power IT Down Day is an initiative set up by Citrix, HP and Intel, to get everyone to fully power down their desktop and laptop computers, and associated monitor, printers, powered speakers, etc. during the off work hours on August 27th. I say fully power down because even hitting the power button on monitors and laptops, for example, doesn't mean they aren't sucking up juice through their standby modes and transformers. Better yet, power it all down, by hitting the power switch on the power strip plugged into the wall.

The idea behind Power IT Down Day is to help all of us be aware, and also to try and start some behavior changes, to save electricity consumed by our individual computers while we're not working at our desks.  According to my podcast guest Tom Simmons, area Vice President Federal at Citrix, many are projecting we could see electric power costs soar in the future similarly to how gas prices skyrocketed this summer. California already suffers rolling brown outs and a lack of power for data centers. The seemingly unlimited low cost power we take for granted today, like the low cost gasoline of the past, could become a scarce and expensive resource in the future.

I'll save some of the specifics behind the program for the coming podcast, but until then please visit http://www.hp.com/go/poweritdown and sign up for the program. Based on the estimated power savings from powered down PCs at participating companies, Citrix, HP and Intel will donate an approximated savings amount the Red Cross. (Personally I wish they were donating the money to help us build more wind farms, or create hydrogen powered cars and fueling stations in the U.S.) I think this is a great program and I hope you'll participate.

Power IT Down Day is a socially conscious conservation effort: Help users, through their company's participation, understand the impact of needlessly leaving computers running during off work hours. That's good stuff, and well worth doing. I hope we change some habits and conserve power as a result. I've already started changing some of my power munching habits just after hearing about the program. But, I think we should tackle something closer to the heart of the problem: designing greener products.

Do monitors, printers, computer motherboards and power supplies, etc., really need to operate in standby mode where they continue to consume power? What's it save us, 10, 5, 3 or 1 seconds to start up our devices faster? Are we that pressed for time or that lazy? Why can't laptop power supplies (bricks) have a built in sensor that determines when laptop batteries no longer need charging, and then fully turn off the transformer? I'm sure those are just a few of the obvious examples and there are many more that could save even more energy.

I have the same beliefs about network security. Educating users only marginally helps the problem. The real issue is designing products that are fundamentally more secure or can automatically configure themselves securely rather than relying on end users to deem what programs should/shouldn't talk through a personal firewall, for example. Same with conserving energy. Fix the problem of creating greener products.

I call on product designers to design products than consume less or no energy, including periods when they might experience light or almost no use, rather than relying on end users to know and act to conserve energy. If you need help understanding how product design decisions impact the "greenness" of a product, and want to know how to design greener products, check out a company called Sustainable Minds (I'm an advisor to this company), their Okala methodology and their green product design industry expert blog. Help us all by starting at the source, creating greener products from the get-go.

And remember to sign up for Power IT Down Day, and most importantly, turn off all that computer equipment when you leave work on August 27th, and every day for that matter.

Virtualization Management Wars

If you follow the virtualization market, and I know you probably do, you may have come across the very vocal advocate Simon Crosby. Simon is the Citrix Virtualization CTO, and was formerly with XenSource and Intel. I had the pleasure of interviewing Simon on my Network World Converging On Microsoft podcast last week. The Interview is in two parts since each part runs around 20+ minutes. Also, here's a video interview with Simon Crosby at Interop 2008, courtesy of Network World's Jon Brodkin.

I've changed some of my views about how virtualization will roll out and impact our industry. A while back I blogged that the hypervisor would become a more important choice than even the operating system. You'd choose your hypervisor technology and then build your data center around that choice. But Simon's all about helping virtualization unfold in a much different way. His belief is that the hypervisor should simply be a feature set, something that comes with the server. (I can hear Hoff's "it's a feature, not a market" argument reverberating in my head now.) And while I'm sure Simon loves Xen's hypervisor, he's also happy to see Sun, Oracle and others, build around the Xen hypervisor. He's even a proponent of Microsoft's Hyper-V, both because it uses Xen's hypervisor as its reference model (though no open source code from Xen is in Hyper-V), and I'm guessing, it's a lot easier to beat VMware by letting them battle it out with Microsoft, rather than take them on by yourself.

The differentiater is to be management tools, and even more so, management tools that can manage other competitors virtualization technologies. Citrix's Project Kenhso is all about creating tools that work across virtualization technology boundaries. Now, I understand the argument that IT shops might be hesitant to align with just one virtualization technology. After all, what do you do if you lose by making the wrong virtualization choice? But then again running multiple could also bring it's own headaches. Vendors, particularly Citrix, must be hearing the call of heterogeneous virtualization IT environments.

That strategy hasn't fully played out yet, but by adding the Microsoft 800 lbs. gorilla to the virtualization contest, things are sure to get interesting. So, take a moment and read Mikael Ricknas article about Project Kensho, listen to the podcast (part 1 and part 2) and the video interview with Simon.

Growing The World of SaaS With Parallels and FORTRUST

This week my company where I’m CTO, Absolute Performance, made a couple of announcements. First, we are attending the Parallels Summit 2008 conference in Washington D.C. where Absolute CEO Jerry Champlin had a talk today about exploiting the explosion of opportunities in the SaaS market. At the show we announced Absolute is adding support for Parallels Virtuozzo Containers, which is how Parallels virtualizes applications above the operating system level, sometimes referred to as OS virtualization. Containers abstract the OS from the application, rather than just the hardware as hypervisors do, allowing you to use the OS as a service to applications in multiple containers. Absolute has already announced support for instrumenting VMware ESX and with the addition of Virtuozzo Containers we’ll begin to provide deep instrumentation of virtualized Parallels environments.

How do you rapidly deploy applications, when they all install, have various requirements, and are managed differently? The effort to install applications can be complex and time consuming. The Application Packaging Standard is a standard, created by Parallels which they are now turning into an industry supported standard, which allows you to package an application once. Control panels, provisioning information, etc., are all standardized through APS. There are also useful services within APS, such as the APS Catalog (lists applications in one place with all their associated updates), APS Identity Service for single sign on for APS apps, and APS licensing (under development) for centralizing and standardizing licensing. There are about 150 applications within the APS catalog today. Absolute Performance announced our support for the APS standard, and also that we will have templates for instrumenting some APS right out the box. After some more research into which are the most widely utilized, we’ll start releasing templates for APS apps in the APS Catalog. Lastly, we announced we are deepening our partnership with Parallels and will work together on future initiatives to help managed services and hosting partners effectively thrive in the world of SaaS.

We also announced our partnership with FORTRUST, a Colorado data center services and collocation facilities provider, who brought out their FORTRUST Managed Services. We’re exciting about partnering with them because they clearly recognize the move towards providing high value services to customers. And not just the typical basic monitoring either, but the full suite of monitoring, management, pre-production load testing, end user experience validation and reporting functions of its managed services offering. FORTRUST has some of the highest quality facilities you’ll see and I think you’ll find the same true of their managed services offerings. All my best to the team there and the new managed services offerings.

As I’ve talked about previously in my NWW blog, SaaS is all about partnering and without effective partnering strategies, it’s a tough go to be a one-vendor show. Partnerships, like those we announced this week, show why it’s the case.

Cisco TrustSec and What Cisco Learned From Cisco NAC's failures

I have two blog posts up on my Network World blog about the Cisco TrustSec announcement. Rather than repeat them here, these two links will take you to my posts.

Policy, Policy... Whose Got The Policy?

What Cisco TrustSec Learned From Cisco NAC Failures

Podcast 50 - "The Big 50" and more

Welcome to our 50th podcast. Has it really been that many? Well, the links don't lie so I guess we've hit a new high water mark.

For our 50th podcast, Alan and I kick back and just talk about what we want to discuss. No guests this time, just us 'ums.  During The Converging Minute I talk about virtualization and security, and how the two are intersecting. Alan and I then turn to topics of interest where we discuss:

• Is security slowing down the adoption of virtualization?
• What good is "menstrual NAC" - you know the kind that only checks devices once a month and my new rules on NAC
• The new space race to put IP technology into space being led by Cisco
• Can UTM be 50% of the network security market?

It's nice to get back to our regular show format, and I hope you enjoy it too. Also, something that I'm very remiss in mentioning is to thank Alan for all of the additional work he does on the podcast.

Alan's been "sound engineer" on the podcast since day one, and while we don't edit our discussions or interviews (they are pretty much as is, just like we recorded them), there is still quite a bit of work involved. Every podcast, Alan splits and combines the channels, splices all the segments together, level-ates the file so everything is the same volume level, and then uploads the file to our ClickCaster site. So "thanks big Al" for all the extra things you do for our podcast.

Enjoy the podcast and feel free to drop us any suggestions or questions at podcast@stillsecure.com.

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When will we see performance measurements and benchmarks for virtualization?

One thing you don't see often is hard numbers around the performance of virtual machines. As virtualization continues its storm into the data center and network, benchmarks and metrics are soon to be  on the horizon.

Until then, a few enterprising technicians are running their own tests and results. Michal Strehovsky has a blog post about his experiences with VMware, Virtual PC and Virtual Box. One thing surprising (or maybe not) is that VMware has a clause in their EULA license that restricts anyone from publishing performance testing numbers without prior viewing by VMware. (See the blog post on Dugie's Pensieve about it.)

So which product testing or product review house, or magazine test lab will be the first to create a benchmark and publish numbers? I hope this isn't too far away. Better information means better planning for the data center and also competition between products.

Having performance benchmarks is one more step for virtualization to become even more of a reality (pun intended.)

Where is virtualization headed? Hear what Diane Greene / VMware CEO says

Ed Scannell, Editor at Redmond Magazine, has a fantastic interview with VMware's CEO Diane Greene. One of the things I enjoy about Redmond Magazine is they take a pretty broad view of things rather than just asking the obvious Microsoft-oriented questions. Ed follows through on this and gives a very complete interview.

Vmware's the darling of virtualization right now and Diane is certainly to be applauded for leading the successful charge, but virtualization is still a relatively new game in town. While Citrix's acquisition of XenSource became official today, the shoe hasn't really dropped on how CitriXen will become a formidable player beyond Citrix's core business. Of course, then there's the question of Microsoft's virtualization capabilities in Windows Server 2008.For my money, two key questions are in play around virtualization and I have my own ideas about what the answers will be.

First - Where does virtualization and the hypervisor belong; at the hardware level or in the OS? At least that's how Diane contrasts VMware's strategy against Microsoft's Viridian. And I think that comparison makes a lot of sense. MS's virtualization is likely to carry with it overhead that could lead to slower performance, system utilization and compatibility issues. But the virtualization embedded in hardware is still early to know for sure whether that's a killer strategy we all think it will be, but my bets are that it will be successful.

Second - Is virtualization ready for some standards? Despite the goodwill of the DTMF efforts to define the Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF), that merely allows vm vendors to understand the virtual environments through XML data. It's not interoperability between products - and that's a long ways off. Right now we are too early in the adoption curve for consortium or standards efforts to be of much importance to the vendors competing for mind share and market share. We'll have to be much deeper into virtualization before any effective standards or collaboration efforts bring much value to the end customer.

But I digress... Bottom line, Ed's interview with Diane Greene is an excellent one and I'd consider it a must read. Go check it out.

What virtualization means for the desktop

We all know and see the huge impact virtualization is having in the data center. Dell will start shipping servers with XenSource in the BIOS. VMware is rocking the planet with their financial performance and leading the virtualization charge. But the focus has been and still is on the server. I've shared my views about virtualization within the network, how virtualization and general purpose hardware breaks the long standing lock between hardware appliances and the network services delivered on them. But what does virtualization mean to the desktop of today and the future?

Desktop environments are a different animal than computers housed and managed within the server room. IT organizations still struggle today to standardize, lock down and manage desktops, laptops and mobile PDAs. And to a large degree the problem will get worse rather than get better.

The whole idea of having a personal computer is to personalize it for the user or owner's individual use. That causes lots of stability and reliability issues because of software from various manufactures that don't play well together, don't follow the rules, over time leave foot prints in registries and files that slow down the system, or make the system unstable. And users are constantly adding and changing the software installed on their computer, adding the latest widget, music program, game, "productive" app (though playing with them all may be counter-productive, lol), etc. Users like to tinker, customize and be their own sys admin for their computer. It's a bit like having the remote control in your hands for the TV. You can adjust everything you want until it's comfortable for right now.

Productive Virtual Environments for Technicians

Today, technical staff are using virtualization to run multiple operating system and their respective applications on one desktop or laptop computer. Imagine yourself a network admin, a sales engineer, or a developer who might want to run Mac OS, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 200x, and any number of Linux variants on one computer as part of their job. In addition to the OSs, virtual networks can be set up between instances to simulate or test different network configurations or routing environments all within the virtualized environment running on one computer. Today and increasingly in the future, virtualization enables technical staff to run full virtualized data centers, networks and their respective applications within one or a small handful of computers. This means reduced lab time, readily available environments to work in, and a virtual world of networks and computers for technicians to work and create in. Virtualization the digital equivalent of what Silicon Graphics workstations brought to hand drawn graphics and art creation.

Delivery of Virtualized Micro Apps

Today we install heavy weight apps and thick clients on the native operating system of desktops. Web browsers have changed that, delivering apps via web-based applications and plugins for browsers, but not every application can or makes sense to deliver over the web. Rather than natively installing every application, applications can be delivered in smaller, pre-packaged, virtualized operating systems which can run on the desktop or on servers across the network. Imagine that your native operating system is really a loader for other virtualized OSs, applications, and combinations of both, that can be loaded and used when needed. Upgrades? Download or push out a new virtual instance with upgraded software and OS. Will the desktop become just a virtualization platform where everything that's run is a virtual instance instead of a native app? Not likely for some time but this concept could easily dwarf the thin client workstations we all thought would take over the desktop but hasn't. Though I don't believe Citrix has yet communicated this kind of a vision, I believe it has to be one of the key reasons for acquiring XenSource.

Can XenSource bring it on and put the smackdown on VMware?

XenSource has some new bravado with their backing as part of Citrix. XenSource believes that customers also want choice. Maybe, but I think it's going to take more than being an alternative, to really win or even displace VMware's dominance.

VMware has some key strategic partnerships, the most significant I believe is with Cisco. But XenSource isn't giving up, no not at all. They partnered with Dell to embed XenSource in the BIOS of Dell hardware. That's more than choice, it's convenience. Will that convenience be enough to stop someone from taking the next step to download and install VMware? Maybe. A lot depends on how easy it is to take advantage of in the bios. Others have partners with computer manufactures too.

The real question, as it is with any acqusition, is how will the acquisition by Citrix help or hinder XenSource? Citrix is a company that's got it together. I think they'll be wise about nurturing XenSource rather than squashing it. But the proof's in the pudding as they say. In the mean time, I'll look forward to working with XenSource in the BIOS of Dell boxes.

VMware success forcing Microsoft to be open

Would you ever have expected anything Microsoft says to including "any individual or organization is free to implement, commercialize and modify Microsoft’s virtualization format technology for free, now and forever"? That's part of Microsoft Open Specification Promise which applies to the new hypercall API added to Viridian virtualization server in Windows Server 2008. The hypcall API extensions were announced at this week's Citrix iForum (InfoWorld article), with public support from Citrix (Xen acquirer) and Novell.

The issue here is companies don't want Microsoft to make claims against software developed on other platforms which may run or operate under Viridian. Why such flexibility from Microsoft? One reason; VMware. VMware's dominance is forcing Microsoft to take the high road and work much more closely with other partners and competitors. Citrix isn't new to the Microsoft game and neither is Novell for that matter, but XenSource virtualization software is new to all of this. Though everyone fears Microsoft dominating markets they enter, here is a great example where competition works. REG Developer sees the VMware influence on Microsoft similarly.

Cisco has to eying this very closely given their "data center fabric" of the future which is all about virtualizing the network cloud. When will Cisco feel the "cooperative vibes" needed to bring the network, computing and software elements together to create the data center of the future? Cooperation like this between Microsoft, Citrix and Novell may not be enough to help Cisco to see the light because they're betting on VMware as the key partner. But Cisco shouldn't forget about the software that's going to run inside those VMware instances from companies like... Microsoft, Novell, Citrix, etc.