To many industry watchers and IT consumers, VMware looks like just another technology to add to the list of operating environments they have to support. The mindset might be that there are some places where it'll work, some places it might not work so well -- really, it's just part of the landscape.
But the more I talk to some customers, they've changed their perspective.
It's not just part of the landscape, it's THE new landscape.
And it's interesting to watch how people's thinking shifts over time.
The House Analogy
I don't know if you've ever had the pleasure (?!?) of building a new house, but -- someway along the process -- you start looking at things very differently.
Maybe the furniture you own does OK in your current house, but really doesn't work well in the new house ... so you figure out a way to get new furniture at some point.
If you're a guy, your wife can help you with this. She also can help with curtains, carpeting, appliances, landscaping, paintings ...
From my perspective, I was very concerned about a lot of things in the new house. I wanted plenty of power plugs in every room -- I hate extension cords. I wanted coax cable in many rooms; wired ahead of time. I put a lot of effort into getting home-theater wiring put into the walls before they were built, and so on.
Simply put, you know you're making a big move, it doesn't happen very often, so you put a lot of thought into things that need to be different in the new house as compared to the old house. And, if you're like me, you have a long list of pet peeves with the old house that you'd like to avoid in the new house.
Simply put, I've noticed that people are starting to think about their VMware environments as their "new house", and not a modification to their old house.
And I think that's a good thing.
The Technology Agenda
I've written before how you can look at infrastructure technology two ways when considering VMware.
The first look is "does it work with VMware?". The answer is -- generally -- yes, most infrastructure technology works with VMware.
But, when people start thinking of VMware as their "new house", they ask a different, more probing set of questions -- is it optimized for VMware and the new way that they'll be running IT?
And you come up with different answers.
In EMC's portfolio, we design storage environments differently for VMware. We look at backup and replication differently. Same for storage management and resource management, as well as a few other topics.
Put differently, all of EMC's products work with VMware, but if you ask for the "optimized" set, we'll give you a different set of answers.
The real difference is perspective: is this an add-on to your old house, or is this your new house?
The Operational Agenda
Sure, you can continue to run IT the way you've always have, and get a lot out of VMware. You'll do provisioning mostly the same, chargeback mostly the same, capacity planning mostly the same. You don't really have to change how you run IT to get a nice chunk of advantages from VMware.
But more and more customers are realizing the potential of order-of-magnitude benefits arising from how they run IT in a virtualized environment -- fundamentally changing the assumptions and processes associated with normal IT operations.
An example is capacity planning -- you think about it differently in a DRS environment. Or provisioning -- an opportunity to do things much faster and much more simply. Or chargeback -- an opportunity to get very creative with the business in sharing costs associated with computing. Or software distribution. Or security. Or business continuity.
Or ... well, it's a long list.
I think the problem lies with us as IT professionals -- we've lived with so many basic assumptions about how IT works that it's hard for us to revisit those assumptions and come up with radically different IT processes and policies that reflect the power of virtualized computing.
We've lived in the old house for so long, many of us are having trouble fully envisioning how to make our lives easier for everyone in the new house. We keep thinking about the old house.
Taking The "New House" Even Further
I've started to meet more and more large IT organizations that are starting to grapple with this problem -- yes, there's a new technology agenda, but there's an even bigger operational agenda at stake.
The opportunity to do IT far faster, far cheaper and far more responsively to the business is extremely tantalizing and compelling. It ain't business as usual.
And a surprising number of them are thinking "new house" explicitly.
They're creating new teams that aren't encumbered by "how we've always done things".
The new teams are free to push the technology -- and the operational models -- to their full potential.
IT management is not insisting that supporting infrastructure technology work with the old and work with the new -- they're entirely focusing on the new. The new teams have the freedom to re-write fundamental assumptions around planning, operations, chargeback -- everything is up for grabs.
Some of them are even going so far as to create new data centers, with new people and skill sets. A real "new house", if you will.
And -- remember -- it's not just servers running non-mission-critical applications. They're thinking serious workloads. High-speed backup and remote replication. Fairly sophsticated orchestration and security.
And, of course, desktops.
Now, I'm not saying that this kind of thinking is widespread, but I'm noticing it more and more often. And I'm guessing -- especially in larger enterprises -- we'll see even more of this thinking in 2008.
The Bottom Line
Sure, it's easy to say "virtualization changes everything" and get some head-nodding. But what I think what's interesting is the coda "... and in a very fundamental way", leading to more and more IT organizations to think less in terms of a gradual migration, and more in terms of a virtual clean sheet of paper.
I don't think everyone will have the luxury of this, but -- make no mistake -- many sophisticated users of IT are now thinking less "improve the old house" and are thinking more about their "new house".
And that's exciting ...
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