Birds of a Feather

April 30th, 2008 by Julia Lim

Why are there so many Canadians at Unconference? Perhaps it has to do with the fact that it’s a bunch of guys (and a few ladies) sitting around with beers and chewing the fat – in this case, the “Grid, On-demand and Virtualization” fat.

Fresh off of walking what must have been the equivalent of a half marathon today, it was nice to take a load off and listen to “experts” and guys in the field discussing their experiences and challenges with these topics. I don’t know why it makes me smile when I hear a Canadian say “aboot”, but the crowd of Canadians at Unconference also made the discussion lively and interesting.

Some interesting tidbits and opinions from the “birds of a feather” discussion:

STORAGE VIRTUALIZATION

• All storage is virtualized.
• Leading storage vendors aren’t addressing storage virtualization; they just take advantage of it as the next buzzword.
• It’s new vendors who are pushing storage virtualization solutions along – for example, Fusion-io with cheap solid state drives that could be combined with block storage.
• IBM bought XIV partly as a “nyah nyah” to EMC; IBM paid something like $17.5 million per customer. Wow.

MONITORING WHAT YOU CAN’T TOUCH

• Virtualization is immature, and the management tools are even more so.
• Vendor api’s for both storage and virtualization often present the wrong data (some emphatic agreement with this one from participants).
• Will providing more intelligence and automation in monitoring/management tools/services cost IT folks their jobs?
• Virtualization requires another layer of monitoring – now I not only have to touch my app and make sure it’s working, I also have to figure out where the heck it is.

What do you think?

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