Things Are Nuts Around Here!
Well, life often throws one a curve now and then. And for me, this is true it seems as well. In just 2009, I have a close family member struggling with cancer, a close family member struggling with heart disease, and lost my favorite pet to old age, my first real pet, Gunter, his full name was Lord Gunter of Fair Winds Kennels. He was a dachshund like no other, a strong fierce spirit, for the past 18 years, never accepted the word or command, compromise. What else could go wrong, I don’t need more stress? Little did I know! Family is one thing, but I have friends struggling as well.
Last week, in one day, I realized I had gotten notification via various methods of more than 10 people I knew, most very well, were laid off. This brings my personal head count to well over 25 in recent months. Most of these 10 or so, I worked with or for many years. No, I am not going to explain specifics of what business segment, or scope I work in, or what areas the respective, recently unemployed, once worked in. That is taboo. As anyone knows, I don’t discuss specifics of or to my blog readers, nor do I discuss specifics about my real-career. What? You ask? This blog is not a job; it is fun, not quite a hobby, but something other than work. But I will say this, I am an engineer, a system integrated, and solution evaluator, so you can gather I have a large scope of friends in the IT field. My friends, yes, friends, at ToutVirtual included!
I am sure everyone understands the current economic situation we are in, specifically the IT industry. As major clients entrench, and new initiative funds dry up, what is the impact to us? What is the impact to virtualization in general? Well that is the interesting thing. Now is the time when virtualization should be going nuts. Firms that never wanted to do virtualization or saw minimum benefit, may be changing their collective minds? No? I wonder? What if the impact of the current crisis is too hard, too bad, too much for virtualization? This is an opportunity but also a threat. How so?
Yes, virtualization saves money. If done right, it should hands down. But it comes at a cost that is not always understood well, or acknowledged up front. With virtualization, your environment is more complex, your technical resources have to be on the ball, and know what they are doing. After all, if they take down one virtual host, and you lose 10, 20, whatever virtual instances in one shot? Right? So it can cost you in unexpected ways if you are not serious about virtualization and support it well. Pre-provision of virtual hosts makes sense; you need that achieve speed to market, right? But that is a capital cost that is not realized or recovered immediately. Your virtual clients may not be ready to use your virtual hosts and associated virtual instances at the same time you bring them online. What if your growth rate has all but died? You have virtual hosts that are under utilized? Ouch. To be sure these issues and more are understood by now, by most that are using virtualization or planning to do so. So what is the point? The point is, do you still really need to virtualize? Or virtualize more than you have?
Yes, but what type of virtualization? I think the current situation is going to push application virtualization into the lime light. I think operating system isolation is going to suffer for it. I think that as corporations look at costs from a strategic perspective, we will see a major push to eliminate multiple operating systems, from environments. For example, do I really need Solaris, Linux and Windows as server platforms? Of course not, many will say. This places emphasis on frameworks, and co-hosts if instances, in SQL, IIS, Oracle, Apache, etc., will reduce operating system sales, and hardware sales, just when hardware sales are hurting in general because of virtualization? Nuts. In fact, cloud computing if done right, will reduce operating system sales, and virtualization sales! It only makes sense, if doing more with less is the goal, operating system isolation virtualization is going to take a hit sooner rather than later.
Yes, we will see more layoffs and downsizing, we will see more friends let go or gone from the world we work in. We are on a downward spiral, still. And our own success nails us, to be sure, because the goal of IT is to reduce personal, flat-out. To do more with less is our super ordinate goal. Never mind the economic cascade and customer entrenchment. Unfortunately, this means that as the front office is downsized so is the back office, and IT is a big part of the back office. Do I see dark days ahead? Yes. What does this mean to me, from a personal perspective? Do I believe I will be out of work? That is a loaded question. But I will say this, as a knowledgeable individual in most things virtual? No, at least not right now. Knowing VMware, Hyper-V, and to some reasonable extent Xen, and soon, KVM? I think I have my bases covered for Hypervisor based virtualization. Time to move to cloud computing?
Yes, I even established an iSCSI and NFS test appliances based on Ubuntu in the home office so I can brush up my skills for Microsoft Fail-Over Clustering, yes, for Hyper-V, as well as improve my overall storage engineering skills as applicable to VMware vSphere, not withstanding Xen and emerging KVM. Never hurts to broaden the skill set. It was quite interesting to setup NFS on Windows 2008 (since having NFS on Windows 2003 up for years), also iSCSI target on Windows 2003 (that was interesting), and then compare these to Ubuntu server variants for NFS server and iSCSI target server. I plan to outline my observations on these efforts over the next few months, documenting what I did and how I did it, as my way of helping others develop their skill sets on tight budget.
Oh, now that I think about it, I need to freshen up the old resume as well. After all, around here, things are nuts!
Add comment February 24th, 2009
