No, your calendar is correct: it's Friday, and this is the Droplets feature, which normally shows up on Monday. After a discussion with Mark Hinkle--who's just really a iron-fisted dictator, let me tell you--Droplets will now be featured on Friday, to wrap up the end of the week, while the feature-oriented Datacenter Barometer will now appear on Tuesdays.
Now, on with the Droplets!
Here's one for you: imagine a world where 20 percent of businesses had no IT assets. No servers, no mainframes, no serious computing power whatsoever.
If you can imagine that, then you'll like what the analysts at Garner had to say in its (somewhat late) predictions for 2010 and beyond: by 2012, "20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets."
Hyperbole? You bet, because in the press release Gartner forgets to specify what kind of assets they're talking about, though the implication is enterprise-level IT, like the big machines back in the server room. Has Gartner jumped the shark? Not really. Sweeping statements aside, Garner is just putting forth the notion that given cloud service availability, there is a very real chance that entire organizations will replace their in-house computational power with cloud computing, and eliminate the need to in-house IT stuff like big hardware (and likely the people to run it).
That seems crazy, but after talking to HyperStratus CEO Bernard Golden today about similar topics, the notion isn't far-fetched. There's huge business agility in flipping a few switches to get 50 Linux servers crunching something for you for a few months compared to the time and labor involved in setting such an infrastructure up in-house. Not to mention the cost savings with cloud.
Something to think about.
And how much savings are we talking about? That's a question that's still open for discussion, but the Open Group put out a whitepaper last month that discussed return on investment (ROI) from cloud computing.
Cloud Musings blogger Kevin Jackson pointed this out, and has some excepts from the report in the form of informative graphs.
The paper doesn't predict what a company's ROI will specifically be when shifting to cloud computing, but instead outlines the steps needed to effectively measure ROI, including describing "approaches to measuring this ROI, absolutely and in comparison with traditional approaches to IT, by giving an overview of Cloud Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and metrics."
If correctly applied to a cloud project, it would be a big help in tracking down the elusive ROI number for a company heading to or arriving at a cloud computing implementation.
That KVM has been a big success as a hypervisor on the Linux platform is little disputed. It's been merged with the Linux kernel, and recently Red Hat announced it would support KVM over Xen beginning with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (though Xen isn't overly worried about it).
Now IBM is publicly pushing KVM as a virtualization option over Xen, just like Red Hat. So should Xen be concerned about that? Perhaps, but it may be VMware that should be more worried.
InformationWeek's Charles Babcock put forth this idea when he spoke with Dan Frye, VP of open systems development, following Frye's speech to the Linux Collaboration Summit last month.
In his article, Babcock reviewed the history of IBM's own support for Xen, support IBM, like Red Hat, seems to be withdrawing in favor of KVM.
"I personally think IBM and several other major companies, including Sun Microsystems and Oracle, joined [forces] behind Xen to create an alternative to VMware's ESX Server. That support rapidly upgraded Xen into a commercial product, which became XenSource's XenServer, Sun's xVM, Oracle's Oracle VM, and Virtual Iron's core hypervisor, now also part of Oracle. But open source developers sensed that Xen was a big company open source project and would serve their purposes in the competition with VMware. They gravitated to an alternative, KVM."
If Babcock's analysis is correct, the new weapon against VMware is going to be KVM, instead of Xen. Given KVM's integration in the Linux kernel, that may give it a distinct advantage over VMware.