Bladewatch.com

I was asking Chris in sunny Canary Wharf how he’s getting on, and asking him that emotional question, do you use your hardware monitoring tools, your Insight Manager, his response is below, and I’ve summarized what his and others issues are, how we move forward, adding value and creating opportunitites.

“Last time I logged in there were 174 critical failures out of our 1100 servers, so I just left it. The problem is, we’ve got a MySQL database with server name, application and contact with a few other bits, that’s what the guys use to know what’s what. We have the time to update our MySQL inventory database as we use it daily, we haven’t necessarily got the time to continually update Insight Manager, so one guy erases everything, uses a batch script to get host name and ip address and then re-imports it all. We then log calls on the errors and it gets left for a while.  With server moves, decommissions and rebuilds, updating our database, the official inventory and the hardware monitoring tool, plus our own bank wide monitoring tools becomes too intensive for not enough value – no end user has ever, ever asked me is my server green in Insight Manger?”

There remains a barrier to entry in using the main vendors hardware monitoring tools from an operations standpoint. Don’t get me wrong, they perform the core objective that is communicating with the specified servers to get their hardware status, to give me an overview of the server estate, so I can see at any point that of the 1200 servers we have, Systems Insight Manager/Dell OpenManage or IBM’s Director can’t speak to 7, 13 have hard drives or non critical errors, 9 have critical errors, and 183 have drivers or firmware that are out of date.

There’s a barrier to succcess. You see, there’s no link between hardware and application.

In many respects from an operational viewpoint the hardware tool becomes irrelevant. There might be steps on the morning checks saying “Check IBM Director, or Check Systems Insight Manager”, but the other morning checks get in the way (check data replication, the clusters or DC replication), calls happen (the intranet is down), systems or application issues arise, and before you know it, it’s already 1am and the hardware monitoring tool is being checked once a week by whoever has or makes the time to check it. To log a call, a change request or request to adjust the drivers on the box, replace the failed component or power cycle it as needed.

As the team start to see the monitoring tool as another system to check, an overhead to take care of, it’s not typically then got the technical backing to integrate the hardware monitoring to our own CA, HP or other monitoring tools, thus the information gets out further of date. As Chris stated above, “we’ve got 274 criticals, he doesn’t want a flood of alerts by turning it on” .

Since these tools have been designed in a specific way, we can’t typically take my SQL database and create a data link, or I can’t simply say, there’s 900 servers in a text file, import them and do a dns lookup. Each one needs typically imported in a specific way in a specific format unless you do one server at a time.

What is it that we need?

• Easy import function and reporting – many have the report function already
• Ability – The ability to add fields – the typical fields that I actually need to support a server, I’ll supply them happily, but consider things like application, business line?
• Knowledge – The knowledge of how we can take the front screen results, the 7 servers we can’t speak to and dynamically present it in another web based application for target audiences/user groups.
• Sharing, how I can make the hardware inventory tool the data platform and have everything either linked into it, or taking feeds from it?
• I already pay for an inventory tool, but having one that I already have installed, that I have the firewall rules configured for would be advantageous.

The ability to link databases to share information for reports, for analysis – do you know how many man hours, man days are spent debating the number of Windows servers per business line, or how many Windows 2003 servers there are with our own inventory tools, the data cleansing, the verification, because each support team has their own inventory as does the application team, then there’s the hardware monitoring tool and the official inventory. All those hours spent “…but that’s not an FX server!” When if you think about it, on a bare minimum we have the core technical information in IBM Director, Dell OpenManage or Systems Insight Manager , we just need the extra support inventory data.

By locking the hardware monitoring tool, by making it propriertory, you limit the possibilities of it’s use and therefore what can be achieved using it. I’ll buy it, if you can allow me to have the secret document, or table layout so I can have my SQL database with hostnames, be the hostnames for Insight Manager, that it can then display my application information etc.

Of course the vendors need to maintain their free tool, they need to support it, but we could achieve so much more from it, add so much more value for the typical SMB or even enterprise by adding a little extra functionality. A list of applications table or an option to say Server9 is a IIS server owned by Front Office and Mike is the contact, with the option to adjust the views seen, an option to white label? http://serverinventory.london.bank:50000 username frontoffice sees only the front office status, even a web page just front office servers?

Again it’s not world ending, it’s not changing what the application is used for, but it’s giving it enough functionality to remove it from an IT no budget, no interest to a business specific tool where functionality matters, where ownership and reporting is key.

Why?

Inventory is king. Who owns what, which systems are owned by which business line, which application or even geographical location. The inventory is used for billing, for support and administration. Therefore whoever is in the inventory business is the king of that IT deployment.

It will be interesting to see if I get any comments about this, I’d love to hear what the vendors viewpoint is.

Businesswire

STAMFORD, Conn.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Liquid Computing, a leader in unified computing infrastructure for the dynamic data center, today announced that Virtuoso®, the leading luxury travel network, has standardized on the LiquidIQ unified computing system for hosting the web-based services it provides to its network of upscale travel agencies. Virtuoso comprises over 300 agencies with over 6,000 elite travel specialists, and more than 1,000 travel providers and destinations worldwide.

Virtuoso made the decision to transition to LiquidIQ as part of an IT modernization initiative designed to support the company’s aggressive plans to grow its business while driving cost efficiencies. LiquidIQ tightly integrates with NetApp to replace a complex assortment of server, network, storage, and virtualization technologies that were becoming increasingly costly to manage and align in response to business needs. A fully integrated “data center in a chassis,” LiquidIQ drives down the time and cost of managing IT infrastructure through unified, software-based control of all resources.

“Our plan is to grow revenue ten-fold in the next five years while at the same time reducing our operating costs, and LiquidIQ was the only platform that could support our goals,” said Joel Chaplin, CIO, Virtuoso. “Liquid Computing won out over competing solutions because they provide the same consolidation advantages but also provide superior control, enabling us to more efficiently scale and manage our operations. By moving to LiquidIQ, we’re lowering our operating costs by as much as 80 percent from reductions in footprint, power consumption and administrative overhead.”

The LiquidIQ platform enables Virtuoso to solve its biggest IT operational challenge of maintaining and deploying clean server configurations when provisioning new equipment or when moving the application between environments, such as from test and development to production or from production to a disaster recovery site. With the LiquidIQ platform, all key server attributes are encapsulated in user-defined profiles, stored in a secure database, and can be deployed on any physical server within the chassis in minutes. Virtuoso assessed virtualization technology, but quickly determined that it would not be able to support the requirements of the company’s applications.

Adopting the right technologies for your business remains key, having the right range of functionality and scalability to enable your IT to move in line with the business requirements can be a transforming opportunity, whether it’s open source, virtualization or application transformation is irrelevant, that it works is all that matters. I’m off to check out LiquidIQ.

HP

HP today announced new virtualization offerings that enable customers to reduce costs and drive greater efficiencies across their entire technology infrastructures.

The offerings include enhancements to the HP StorageWorks and HP client virtualization portfolios that deliver a seamless transition from a physical to a fully virtualized environment.

“Customers are continuously looking for new ways to simplify the deployment of virtualization while reducing the administrative costs and complexities associated with the transition process,” said Bob Meyer, worldwide solution manager, Virtualization, HP. “HP offers a comprehensive range of solutions that allow customers to address their virtualization needs from the desktop to the data center.”

Enhance data center automation with HP StorageWorks and Citrix StorageLink

To enable organizations to become more efficient, HP is working with Citrix to provide a high degree of storage automation and integration within virtualized environments. HP announced in May that it is a charter member of the Citrix Readyâ„¢ Open Storage Program. Today, HP is expanding the collaboration and will now support Citrix Essentialsâ„¢ with StorageLinkâ„¢ technology to allow customers to maximize their HP storage array capabilities.

Citrix StorageLink is an interface that automates storage provisioning and management within virtualization and application delivery products from Citrix and Microsoft. This enables HP StorageWorks EVA, MSA and LeftHand arrays to be optimally utilized with Citrix XenServer™ and Microsoft® Hyper-V. With StorageLink, virtual server and desktop environments can be managed simultaneously with storage environments through a single administrator, saving both time and operational costs.

The new offering allows customers to reduce administrative costs, while taking full advantage of HP array features. This can improve performance, increase availability, enable faster response time to IT changes and enhance storage efficiency.

“Our collaboration with HP provides an economical solution to the ever-growing complexities and resource costs associated with data center deployments,” said N. Louis Shipley, group vice president and general manager, XenServer Product Group, Citrix. “StorageLink not only maximizes the functionality of HP’s storage arrays but also enhances HP’s overall solutions for virtualization.”

Further enabling virtualization opportunities has to be a good thing for the end user community. Affordable and scalable technology is one of the first component parts to your virtual storage, I’m off to read up more.

I had a chat with a service delivery manager who was telling me how he was getting on in their enterprise. They’ve been talking about deploying VMware, but before they did this, he was wondering if we should address some communication and perception issues.

He provided the example below, which illustrates brilliantly the kind of environment and relationship between the infrastructure and application teams. The underlying lack of ‘trust’ or working relationship other than email constituted in on going issues of delivery, innovation and ongoing process innovation. That the hope of deploying virtualization or consolidation might help with this (from IT), without understanding that until the trust, that there is effective communication, no technology is going to be the fix.

Related to this was one of the application teams logging a call to have their development server have the Oracle client installed. It was great to see the call log and the email exchanges. I’ve summarized the emails and made them generic to hide the organizations name:

“Please can you log a call to the Windows team to install Oracle 10.2 on development server NYKW90001 and email when complete.

Regards

John

Settlements Development”

The Windows engineer saw the call, scheduled the SMS drop for 6pm (London time as the call was Logged in London) for that Wednesday, which installed the Oracle client and then rebooted the server as it had to load some system variables and bank specific settings. He then updated the work log:

“Drop scheduled for 6pm and completed ok. Emailed user, closing call accordingly.”

A complaint was raised by the Head of that application team, the email as follows:

“Please can IT explain why the server was rebooted, also confirm who authorised the reboot of this server as this caused disruption to the development team, which is an unacceptable business expense and service disruption.

Also please note that from now, development servers for the Settlements application cannot be rebooted without prior authorisation, a service request and email from me or a manager of the team, preferrably with sufficient notice and out of core business hours.

Mike

Head of Settlements Development”

Windows Server team leader responds:

“The server was rebooted in order to complete the installation of the Oracle client as per request 832491 logged by John, the call did not note that the server could not be rebooted, therefore no further action or notification was taken.  I suggest that the development team note if there is an issue rebooting the server when a package is to be dropped.”

The Head of Settlements development responds, copying in all development team line managers

“Thank you for your comments, IT does not follow any level of due diligence in preventing outage? This outage caused our team disruption and development time, the development platforms remain an important element of the IT infrastructure in order to provide continued enhancements requested to the business.

I do not expect that my developers know the contents and implications of deploying application packages for infrastructure packages.  I suggest we look at creating a process to prevent IT unnecessarily causing an outage to business systems as a result of the work they are undertaking.  Maybe we need to look at a Development change process?”

As a result of all the development managers and development teams being copied in, a debate results about the fact that IT might just reboot any development team whenever it likes without debate, that they don’t understand the implications and maybe that development needs to be re-defined and have its own change process. The actual outage resulted in a delayed development batch causing the development team to get their results 45 minutes late. IT then became defensive as the discussion continued, allowed the debate to continue via email (a media that is all to easy to skim read and press send), resulting in:

“All requests to the Settlements server infrastructure logged, need an attached email word document with authorisation from the Head of Settlements Development, with a date and time when the work is to take place.  An email then to be sent to the Windows team notifying them of the work, and the work to be completed in the scheduled time, and an email sent to the development team when complete.

No work to be undertaken on the Settlements development infrastructure without permission during the business week without 96 hours notice unless mandated by the development team.”

This creates a substantial management overhead and has to be replicated to business teams requesting it, who then site Settlements as the justification, it results in changing development as an environment to become effectively Production in all but name.

In effect a 45 minute outage on a development platform resulted in several man hours spent across business lines debating the issue, debating responsibility and resolution, resulting in additional overhead and disruption to service improvement or platform evolution.

What should have happened.

A phone call to the Head of Settlements Development, basically outlining that we apologise that the server was rebooted, that the server was rebooted as a result of a request from one of the development team and we had thought everyone was aware that the work was going ahead. Of course delivery and availability of the platform is our key objective, and we will work to ensure that the team are notified of the importance of the Settlements infrastructure, and that to call the team before undertaking any work to prevent any unexpected behaviour or outage. This typically involves an email to the Windows team outlining the importance of the Settlements infrastructure being available, and that any changes be notified to the Settlements Development team before being undertaken, unless otherwise scheduled through the change process.

The key to this is that if I see enough emails back and forth saying someone wronged me, they become gospel, we need to abstract debate, that way it’s a mistake by whoever, it’s fixed now, next.

Crucial:

• End the debate.
• A phone call transforms the conversation from one involving the universe, it avoids any debate, of you guys, to a what pains you and how can we fix this.
• The longer the email chains continues, the longer we are stuck in the past and not moving forward, we’re in the here and now what can we do now to prevent it going forward.
• Address each point in a binary fashion without debate, apologize where necessary, adopt the, it’s happened (not being flippant), apologies, we will do everything we can to prevent, next!

Pressebox or HP

HAMBURG, Germany, June. 25, 2008 – For the second consecutive year, the HP BladeSystem c-Class server has dominated the TOP500 list of the world’s largest supercomputing installations by providing customers with strong cost, space and energy savings.

HP’s leadership position on the TOP500 list continues to grow, claiming 212 (42 percent) of the 500 systems on the list. HP BladeSystem technology is ideal for HPC because it delivers extremely strong compute performance at an affordable cost. These servers also utilize less physical data center space than the proprietary systems that historically dominated the list. Customers have made HP BladeSystem c-Class the fastest growing server architecture ever to enter the TOP500 list.

IBM maintains its second place ranking with 37 percent of the systems on the TOP500 list, while Dell slips to fifth with just 14 qualifying installations.

“Customers continue to drive higher performance and increased energy efficiency with blade servers, gaining more value from every IT dollar spent,” said Christine Martino, vice president and general manager, Scalable Computing and Infrastructure organization, HP. “The continued growth of HP customers on the TOP500 list demonstrates a market shift to industry-standard architectures. Standards-based platforms address a broader set of high performance computing challenges more efficiently and at a far lower cost than legacy systems and mainframes.”

About the rankings

The TOP500 ranking of supercomputers is released twice a year by researchers at the Universities of Tennessee and Mannheim, Germany, and at NERSC Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The list ranks supercomputers worldwide based on the Linpack N*N Benchmark, a yardstick of performance that is a reflection of processor speed and scalability.

More information about HP HPC is available at www.hp.com/go/hpc.

Visit HP in booth 210 at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC ’09) tradeshow in Hamburg, Germany, June. 23-25, for demonstrations of the company’s HPC offerings.

About HP

HP, the world’s largest technology company, provides printing and personal computing products and IT services, software and solutions that simplify the technology experience for consumers and businesses. HP completed its acquisition of EDS on Aug. 26, 2008. More information about HP (NYSE: HPQ) is available at http://www.hp.com/.

The ratings are always an interesting read and can be debated until the end of time. What matters is that your HP solution delivers the value and service required in an energy and cost efficient footprint, regardless, well done to HP and their competitors for the recognition/achievements on the ‘TOp500 supercomputing installations’, it’s great to see the discussion about performance and energy efficiency, particularly as we examine performance per watt, do we need that 20% performance improvement at a 40% increased power requirement when it comes to the processor?

Making the right decisions on your system configuration, the server, the network and the storage, is just as important as looking at your application design, configuration and deployment.

HP

HP today expanded its telecom hardware portfolio with powerful, carrier-grade versions of the company’s most advanced enterprise servers and storage products.

The new offerings provide telecom companies the reliability set by NEBS requirements, as well as the lower cost and flexibility of industry-standard products.

Targeted at service providers and network equipment suppliers, the products include the HP BladeSystem Carrier-Grade (CG) platform, the HP ProLiant carrier-grade rack-mount server and the HP carrier-grade storage array. The new products can be deployed in both telephony and IT networks, enabling customers to operate more efficiently as the two environments converge.

“Customers are looking for flexible, open platforms that deliver greater speed, more agility and lower costs,” said Chuck Smith, vice president, BladeSystem Business Development, HP. “With expertise in both telecom and IT, HP provides a family of servers that combines the best of both worlds: the cost-effectiveness of proven IT platforms plus the reliability, performance and ETSI/NEBS Level 3 certification of carrier-grade platforms.”

Using the most advanced Intel® processors, both the HP BladeSystem and the HP ProLiant platforms double the performance of their predecessors and provide greater energy efficiency.

The two HP carrier-grade platforms support a variety of operating environments, including Windows®, Linux, HP-UX, OpenVMS and Solaris from Sun Microsystems. By joint agreement, HP will distribute and provide full software support for Sun Solaris 10 on HP ProLiant and HP BladeSystem platforms.

In addition to blade and rack-mount servers, HP offers a large portfolio of telecom software, services and integrated solutions to the world’s 200 major service providers and network equipment suppliers.

Industry support for HP platforms

Acision, which provides communications for more than 300 network operators and service providers globally, is using HP BladeSystem platforms as it takes advantage of the ongoing convergence between telephony and IT.

“As the world’s leading messaging company, Acision is focused on providing customers with high-value solutions quickly and cost-effectively,” said Anantha Ramu, vice president and principal architect, Engineering, Acision. “With the ability to host both enterprise and carrier-grade applications on a single platform, the HP Integrity BL860c server blade helps Acision minimize engineering and testing costs and reduce our time-to-market for new messaging solutions.”

Oracle, a global leader in communications software, is enabling communications service providers to scale services profitably on the latest generation of HP BladeSystem servers.

“The performance and scalability of the Oracle Communications software running on HP BladeSystem servers is an ideal blend for helping service providers increase monetization speed while maintaining control,” said Indu Kodukula, vice president, Service Delivery Products, Oracle. “The HP BladeSystem infrastructure reduced our engineering and integration costs, enabling our customers to scale immediately with low operating costs.”

New servers and storage expand HP portfolio

The new additions to HP’s carrier-grade portfolio include the following:

• HP ProLiant DL380 G6 server doubles performance over previous versions of the rack-mount server. It also provides significant gains in energy efficiency. Now available in a carrier-grade version, the HP ProLiant DL380 G6 includes two 2.53-GHz Intel quad-core processors.
• HP StorageWorks MSA2000fc G2 and MSA2000sa G2 carrier-grade storage arrays deliver support for high-availability and data protection capabilities through features such as snapshots for point-in-time copies of data. They support up to twenty-four 146 gigabyte SAS disks (3.5 terabytes) in a single 2U enclosure and are available in a dual-array controller configuration. A choice of host connectivity with Fibre Channel or SAS is also available.
• HP Integrity BL860c carrier-grade server blade provides extreme scalability and high performance for applications such as text messaging. The server blade is designed for the HP c7000-cg enclosure.
• HP ProLiant BL460c G6 carrier-grade server blade delivers performance that is two times faster than previous versions. Energy efficiency also is enhanced significantly. The HP ProLiant BL460c G6 is upgraded with two 2.53-GHz Intel quad-core processors, which enable a single HP BladeSystem c7000-cg enclosure to accommodate up to 16 blades for a total of 32 Intel quad-core processors in a 10U enclosure.

HP also announced enablement of OpenSAF and OpenHPI on HP BladeSystem Carrier-Grade and HP ProLiant Carrier-Grade rack-mount platforms. Both OpenSAF and OpenHPI are open source implementations of Service Availability Forum (SA Forum) specifications. HP is a founding member and major contributor to OpenSAF.

Bringing the efficiency and performance improvements of the G6 portfolio of products to the Carrier-Grade customers has to be a good thing for the Carrier-Grade community in terms of choice, and energy efficiency based on the new Intel processors with the uniform power supplies that have been introduced, which should reduce the range of power supplies kept on site for hot spares.

HP

HP (NYSE: HPQ) and Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) today announced they have signed a relationship agreement establishing both parties’ intent to form a 10-year global alliance to help customers leverage the convergence of telecommunication and IT.

Once the definitive agreement has been executed, the companies will jointly market solutions and capabilities that enable end-to-end transformation for service providers and enterprises.

The companies plan to launch a global go-to-market program to transform communication networks into converged, next-generation infrastructures. As a result of this transformation, service providers will be able to efficiently deliver new, revenue-generating services. HP and Alcatel-Lucent also plan to offer services to manage the new and existing infrastructures for customers looking for flexible sourcing options.

HP and Alcatel-Lucent also plan to create a joint go-to-market initiative to provide communications solutions to mid- and large-size enterprises and public sector organizations. Alcatel-Lucent products in areas such as IP telephony, unified communications, mobility, security and contact centers will be integrated with HP IT solutions. These joint solutions are planned to be offered to enterprises through HP resellers or as managed services.

It will be interesting to see what range of innovations and products or services arise from this announcement, anything in the virtualization and next generation data center/IT space has to be a welcome thing, I wonder if there might be more in converging the desktop and communications technologies? Will we ever see my desktop down my IP phone?

PC World

Sun’s development Rock processor was a troubled project that may never have stood a chance, analysts said following reports that the chip had been axed.

Earlier this week, the New York Times reported that Sun had cut development of the 16-core Rock chips, which were designed to go into high-end servers. The multithreaded processor would have doubled the core count from Sun’s fastest server processor today, the eight-core UltraSparc T2, and was targeted at enterprise servers to process data-intensive applications like databases.

Rock’s development had been a high-priority project within Sun, and the company poured plenty of money into its development. Sun had high expectations for the chip, which blended high multithreading capabilities with quick instruction processing. Rock was originally due for release in 2008, but Sun said last year that it had delayed the release until the second half of 2009.

The Sun platform continues as does the demand for their operating system, so many customers have committed to the platform, we’ll need to see how things continue moving forward, but we have to examine the market place for the processor platform – we only need to develop processors that are demanded by the end user community. If we only sell so many high-end servers, would the investment not be better spent at the lower/middle end of the market where so many customers purchase systems? It’s all a mute debate, Sun/Oracle will be working on what’s best for revenues, their end user community and the Rock platform long term, an interesting read, do check it out.

Reuters

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – LG Electronics will start selling this month flatscreen monitors that can function as virtual computers, saving costs by allowing multiple users to run programs off a single standard PC.

LG’s new liquid crystal display SmartVine N-series monitors will include embedded “virtualization” technology from U.S.-based NComputing Inc. Users can connect a keyboard and mouse directly to the monitor, which will in turn connect to a standard PC.

Through virtualization, the LG monitor will allow as many as 11 users to share a single PC for a total cost of roughly $3,000, NComputing said.

Virtualization refers to technology that allows one computer to perform the work of many machines.

“Every single one of our workstations needs a monitor, so why not build our technology directly into the monitor,” said Stephen Dukker, chief executive of privately held NComputing.

Dukker previously founded and was CEO of low-cost PC outfit eMachines, which was eventually sold to Gateway in 2004.

Very cool, I’ll need to go and check it out, but could this be the next ‘standard’ type solution for the enterprise rather than the thin client and monitor equivalent for standard roll outs? We’ll have to see.

Network World

One-third of 1,200 organizations (33%) plan to convert their application environments away from a traditional, client-server model to one based on virtualization and cloud computing over the next two years, according to a study commissioned by Microsoft and released today. The study sought to broadly determine global IT spending priorities.

The most interesting part of this (technologies aside) is how we manage the change within the enterprise, how we change and updated our processes, our billing and management, don’t get me wrong, we’ll still need server, storage and networks people, but do the roles not change from you do Windows and nothing else, to you do Windows on thin client technology, so you need to know VMware, Hyper-V, Windows, thin client technology etc, and how does this affect career progression, salaries and everything else? In a cloud/virtualization platform isn’t service delivery ever more important as everything is dependent on everything else, the days of answering the phone and saying “the server pings and it works for me…” are gone, we want service delivery based technical people. Does this not mean I want someone that knows enough of specific platforms/applications rather than specialist in everything?

Are businesses ready for this kind of environment and how do we transform our organization in terms of costs structures, budget and delivery? How do I strategically protect my business value? Is information, design, the application if you like not becoming your core business rather than the business function? If we take the car market, could I dare say the statement I don’t care who builds the car, providing it meets Volvo design, parts and standards? Could we ever see the era where you buy a design and have it built locally rather than ship a car around the world? What does that say for the car manufacturer? For the investment bank? Does an investment bank become a trade desk and a team of developers? This becomes ever more relevant if your subsidiaries, competitors or partners are white labeling your applications, your infrastructure for their business – who’s core business is that? Where is the value to shareholders/stakeholders/partners? What stops Bill from Oxford creating a massive trading house by running a series of applications white labeled from an investment house – how do we value Bill’s company and revenues? Is it not a brand rather than a business?

If I use VMware as a platform for my infrastructure, how many years away are we from Exchange, from Lotus Notes or my inhouse applications being written for Xen, for VMware containers rather than Windows 2003? Is VMware becoming the operating system, and everything becoming integrated to the application?