Blade Watch

Eweek

Cisco and VMware are working on a proof-of-concept around the idea of using VMware’s VMotion technology to move live virtual machines between multiple data centers, a capability that would aid in such areas as load balancing, data center maintenance and disaster avoidance. The two companies demonstrated the proof-of-concept during the Cisco Live show. However, VMware officials warn that more work needs to be done to make the concept a reality.

Cisco Systems and VMware are developing ways that enterprises can use VMware’s VMotion technology to move live virtual machines from one data center to another.

The two companies showed off a proof-of-concept at the Cisco Live 2009 show in San Francisco, and demonstrated the capabilities during Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior’s keynote address July 2.

The project is still in the proof-of-concept stage, but VMware official Guy Brunsdon said in a recent blog post that moving live virtual servers to other locations over a WAN holds promise for businesses in a number of areas.

In particular, the capability would help enterprises in load balancing compute resources over multiple sites, Brunsdon said in his blog posted June 29. Businesses also could save power and cooling costs by being able to dynamically consolidate VMs to fewer data centers, he said.

This is very cool and is another step towards what we’ve written about here and here before; the next generation infrastructure, moving to that ideal where we can move the IT around following the sun or the business activity. The concept being that I can take New York’s data center down, patch it and update it whilst New York’s services run from London, Singapore or Tokyo, or even better wherever the carbon cost or energy costs are lowest. With a truly mobile virtualized infrastructure, we can free the business and the IT to work around each other, that I need to upgrade all my servers service packs, with co-ordination might be done during the business day rather than at weekends, we simply switch users around the infrastructure, managing the load, managing the outage, doing changes on a global or local level as needed.

On an operational level, just how cool would it be if I could have the reserve and the capacity to have true resilience, that London’s data center looses power isn’t an issue, we can fail it to Tokyo as they’re offline, that the data center can go offline to save power and carbon footprint and have the data move wherever the business is.

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