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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Special Features:
POLICY-BASED APP. MGMT A KEY IN
DATA CENTER AUTOMATION
By Ahmar Abbas
The ever increasing complexity of the enterprise data center is challenging
IT
managers to come up with creative ways to manage the data center, and do so
while keeping the costs down. However, many executives worry that current
inflexibility of the IT infrastructure actually hamstrings corporate business
strategy. Product development, product launches, channel development and other
activities get delayed or even abandoned due to the difficulty and cost of
modifying today's information technology infrastructure.
In response, major IT vendors have outlined major initiatives to help
enterprises automate the data center and increase flexibility by allowing
resource sharing. Some of these are listed below:
- Sun: N1
- Computer Associates: On-Demand Computing Initiative
- IBM: E-Business On-Demand
- HP: Adaptive Enterprise
- Veritas: Building Blocks for Utility Computing Initiative
- Fujitsu: Treole
While each of the vendor initiatives carry different monikers, their
overall
strategies appears to be similar. Each vendor offers an evolutionary approach
which starts with simple data center automation and progressively moves to a
data center environment in which all resources and applications are
virtualized and contain a high degree of self management capabilities.
To achieve these goals, the major IT companies have opted for strategic
acquisitions to complement and expand their technologies and product
portfolios. The tempo of acquisitions by large systems vendors has increased
in the recent months. In the third quarter 2003 there were half dozen
acquisitions in this area. Over the last 12 months there have been deals worth
almost $1 billion. For example, Sun recently acquired Center Run to complement
its earlier acquisitions of Terraspring and Pirus. Meanwhile, IBM has acquired
ThinkDynamics, while Veritas scooped up Jareva.
This wave of acquisitions has focused on automating the management,
provisioning and sharing of various data center hardware resources. However,
one glaring omission is the ability to dynamically allocate resources to
applications based on pre-defined policies and real-time business needs. Or
stated another way -- the on-demand aspect of computing is still missing in
the existing offerings. In Sun N1's evolutionary path this is Phase 3, and
referred to as Policy-based Automation; IBM considers this Level 5, or the
Autonomic Level of data center management; while at Computer Associates, this
is Phase 4, and is referred to as Business-driven Infrastructure
Management.
We believe this sets the stage for major systems vendors to start a new
wave
of acquisitions centered around policy-based application management and
application virtualization -- elements that exist in a few startups, but are
most prominent in Ejasent, a 4-year old technology company based in Mountain
View, Calif.
Ejasent has developed a broad suite of products that provide just-in-time
application availability through its policy-based application management.
Central to this capability is the company's application virtualization
technology, which provides an abstraction layer between applications and the
underlying infrastructure. This allows applications to be deployed to pools
rather than specific servers, to be invoked or revoked in seconds upon demand,
to be migrated from a maxed out 2-way server to a 4-way server while
maintaining session state and user connections, all of which results in
significantly higher utilization of computing resources and optimized balance
between availability and resource allocation. What distinguishes Ejasent's
technology in particular is its support for complex, multi-tiered, enterprise
applications (e.g. databases or complex ERP applications). Ejasent has filed
for over a dozen patents around its virtualization, connection migration, and
policy management technology within its UpScale product, which we believe to
be quite unique.
The company also has a complementary metering and chargeback product,
MicroMeasure, that it claims to be the only one on the market that monitors
usage of the difficult to measure logical resources (e.g. application usage,
transactions, i/o, throughput, etc.) in addition to the typically measured
physical computing resources (e.g. CPU, memory and storage).
Some other likely acquisition targets that we believe belong to this wave
include: VMware, a Palo Alto, Calif., private company that provides
virtualization through its virtual machine technology; Opsware, the famed Marc
Andreessen public company headquartered in Silicon Valley; and Egenera, a
Marlboro, Mass., company that provides a virtualization solution coupled with
an increasingly-popular blade server architecture. Given the expected size of
the utility computing market, and the current level of focus by major platform
and software players, we expect that only a few (if any) of these companies
will remain independent over the next couple of years.
Ejasent has developed a strategy to go to market solely through
partnerships
with large system vendors which is giving the potential acquirers the ability
to closely evaluate the company's technology and products. In our discussions
with members of Ejasent's management team, the company believes that it can
successfully continue to build a stand-alone business. However, our view is
that Ejasent's technology seems to strategically fit into many platform
companies' near-term Utility Computing roadmaps.
It wouldn't be surprising if one of these large system vendors acquired
Ejasent to round out its current product portfolio. With enterprise customers
demanding comprehensive utility computing/on-demand solutions, we sense a
certain level of urgency among the major systems vendors to bolster their
product and technology portfolios both to satisfy customer requirements as
well as gain a substantial competitive advantage.
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