Reports from the Trenches: What’s Working in Virtualization and Green IT, moderated by Larry Hale, Director, Office of Infrastructure Optimization, GSA
Panelists:
- Jack Baxter, Manager, IT&S, Government Printing Office
- Richard Fichera, Director, Blade Systems Strategy, HP
- Bernard Golden, CEO, HyperStratus
- Dale Wicklizer, US Public Sector CTO, NetApp
Larry Hale has some starter questions for the panel:
1. Biggest challenges in adopting virtualization?
Jack Baxter: Greatest challenges: application qualification, funding, hardware and how it’s going to be used. Heterogeneous environment calls for a lot of up-front research.
Dale: Moving to cloud computing requires a mental shift. Iron huggers need to switch from managing stuff to managing service-level agreements.
Richard Fichera: Distinction between virtualization and cloud. Virtualization is well adopted. Cloud is very early. Adding to Dale and Jack, there are internal process barriers. Applying current processes to virtual machine environment will lose advantage of shared service environment.
Bernard Golden: Breaking down of traditional IT silos, forces people to work together who never have, need to optimize / change vertical processes for horizontal view.
2. Is there one government agency that best illustrates benefits of virtualization?
Dale: Federal government is Navy / Marines. In rest of public sector, great work going on in universities. Grant providers don’t want money going to IT, want it applied to research. Universities are starting consortiums of shared IT resources, using virtualization.
Richard: School district work as well. Virtual desktops that follow students around school. Others that provide shared resources across schools in a district.
Bernard: Refers to prior session, says Casey Coleman was modest in her description of Apps.gov, and he points to Apps.gov as the best example.
3. Role of virtualization in government in next 5 years?
Jack: Downside of virtualization is ease of creating a server, results in server sprawl. Still need a datacenter plan and management. Calls out VMWare as an important management tool.
Bernard: Virtualization will be the defacto way servers work. Will be packaged with every server and default configuration.
Dale: Most organizations will have hybrid cloud environment. Legacy will remain as is. Core, mission critical applications will run on internal (private) cloud. Other mission applications will run on public clouds.
Richard: Not focused on government. Financial services industry is further ahead, virtualization is mainstream in commercial space. Emphasizes he is saying virtualization, not cloud. There is still a layer of physical machine management. In future, integrated management of these two control planes.
Need to think about overall reliability, not reliability of single elements. This can be achieved with a collection of cheaper infrastructure, don’t need to rely on expense high availability infrastructure. But, need to plan and manage for overall (application layer) reliability, not physical elements.
Dale: Points out that cheaper infrastructure models, such as Google and Amazon, require more physical infrastructure and creates server (and therefore datacenter) sprawl. This is fine for users of Google and Amazon, but not necessarily for private datacenters and private clouds. (Please note, Dale is with NetApp).
Richard: Coming to Dale’s defense, reminds everyone that infrastructure from vendors like NetApp is not nearly as expensive now, as it has been. This price efficiency will only increase. At the same time, systems integrators will become more sophisticated in delivering low cost infrastructure solutions. [Of course, you need to pay the SIs]. [Please note, Richard is with HP]
Bernard: Going forward, applications will be written with different assumptions, one of which is that hardware costs won’t be constraining.
4. Primary security considerations with virtualization?
Dale – starts with cloud, not virtualization. Calls out Terremark and FISMA certification. States that many virtual private cloud environments have better security than organizations currently have in place, on premise.
Bernard – In addition to FISMA, organizations need to be concerned with privacy regulations. Privacy regulations are not up-to-date with technology advances.
Richard – The “spectacular security breaches” in cloud computing will have same root causes as today, passwords on post-its, using dog’s name for server password, etc.
The panel continued with a good discussion on virtualization, product or journey. The answer, as you know, is journey. The steps expressed, standardization, consolidation etc. are well known, so I didn’t capture again here.
An important note, is that this panel focused heavily on virtualization as being a step to the clouds, leading cloud thinkers, say otherwise. I’ll post in-depth on this another time. Think bundles, patterns and frameworks.
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