What derivative of virtualization are you?

http://joyeur.com/2007/09/19/virtualization-is-more-than-just-consolidation

I was asked to co-present with an engineer from Sun at an upcoming conference in October. I asked him to do his slides and then shoot me over the presentation so I could fill in my half. I noticed that his view of virtualization and mine were very different. To put it into jargon speak, there is a difference between Redshift virtualization and Blueshift virtualization.

So what is this redshift/blueshift stuff about? Redshift is a theory created by Sun Microsystems CTO Greg Papadopoulos. Essentially it says that there are two different classes of business: “blueshift” companies that grow according to GDP and are essentially over-served by Moore’s Law that computing power doubles every two years, and “redshift” companies that grow off the charts, and which are grossly under- served by Moore’s Law.

At Joyent, we have both kinds of customers, but we are really born to serve the “redshift” market. When your site is in development, you want to save on cost. But when you open up and start to explode like a Twitter or FaceBook, you join the redshift elite – and suddenly cost falls away as a concern, replaced with a vicious need to scale to meet the demands. When users pour into your site, the ability to scale is the difference between life and death, between getting rich and updating your resume.

Check out this article, it’s talking about the different types of virtualization which I confess to have not really thought about that much. Virtualization to me is two things, a way of abstracting the hardware from the application, and also about using our resources more efficiently, not only from an energy standpoint, but also in terms of memory, processor and storage etc. I remember all those times you’ll read those reports quoting how much processor time is actually used in the average application server, that we’re using 15% of the cpu all the time, and 60% of the storage, reclaiming all those cpu cycles, the memory and the storage could bring significant savings.

But where virtualization really brings benefits is in the non-technical arena. The ability to turn it all around, to be a real business enabler, that the IT infrastructure can grow and adapt in line with the business need, that we move to a system of service provisioning where IT handle everything and provide the business with the virtual instance, a world where I can request a server for a month to test that .NET framework 3.0 works ok with my application, then give it back, where I can be allocated more processing power or memory in minutes not weeks due to the purchasing process needing sign off, processing and parts delivery.

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