System iNetwork

June 30, 2008

A Very Busy Virtual Future

Every now and then I stumble upon an interesting nugget -- this one comes courtesy of Joe Clabby, president of Clabby Analytics. I asked him where we're headed with IBM's PowerVM virtualization product and IBM's efforts with virtualization, especially since the System i world was already swimming in the virtualization pool back when VMware was toddling around in x86 diapers. His answer alluded to an interesting vision of the future enterprise data center as well as the likelihood that the vast majority of servers and operating systems are eventually going to be virtualized.

Here's a snip from Clabby:

Start with the mainframe that has been virtualizing stuff for 40 years . . . then what you're seeing is the advanced mainframe functionality like the advanced virtualization management and granularity being naturally rolled down into the Power Systems line, which was the former System p and i. It's key to IBM's new enterprise data-center strategy to highly virtualize these systems in order to handle the service-oriented workloads that those systems are going to be running in the future.

So yes, System i has had the ability to run LPAR since the mid-90s or earlier, and System p has had logical partitioning, too, but now you're seeing it become more advanced, more granular, better managed, and the whole emphasis there is to prepare for their new enterprise data center push.

If you take a look at information systems in general and the basic principles of on-demand computing, what we're trying to do as an industry is to build our information systems to transparently flow business processes, regardless of what platform those processes are running on. Information systems, if they are utilized properly, serve process flows, not the other way around.

So if that's the big picture, then what you've got to do is build your information systems so that they can handle this heavy message-oriented traffic that's created by Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). If you move your information systems to SOA, then you're going to drive those SOA process flows over virtualized consolidated underlying systems . . . that's the design point the industry in general is working toward. So in terms of advanced virtualization and all the stuff you're starting to see in Power Systems, that's all toward building these highly optimized, finely tuned, very busy systems.

Posted by cmaxcer at June 30, 2008 9:09 AM