Things that Piss Me Off
As everyone knows, I am a very level headed fellow who is not inclined toward strong opinions, strong drink or extremes of any sort. Okay, let me set down my Jack Daniels while I give myself another body piercing and prepare to rant about things that piss me off.
Things have been coming at me in droves lately that make me wonder about my choices in my life. They are perhaps magnified by the situation at home — parent’s illness, ongoing construction on the house, cold and flu season, etc.
I am pissed off especially these days when vendors continue to perpetuate half truths and lies, insisting that truth is only a lie told often enough that it becomes familiar. I encountered several instances of this lately coming from the usual three letter acronyms and their minions. Here are some examples:
Virtualization makes things less complex to manage. This is only true if accompanied by the assertion that there were no problems in the infrastructure that was virtualized. Here is the easiest way I know to describe it. I use this in some of my PowerPoints.
You have an ugly female server or storage geek and an ugly male server or storage geek whose looks limit their reproductive opportunities. So they go to Irvine, CA where the plastic surgeons outnumber the humans 8 to 1 and get some work done that makes them look like supermodels. They subsequently meet, fall in love, marry and have ugly offspring…
As in this example, virtualization does nothing to change the genetics of the infrastructure. It only changes the presentation layer. If you have underlying problems, they are more difficult to troubleshoot because another layer of abstraction has been added to the mix.
Are we getting this yet?
Secondly, only about 17 to 20 percent of the server world is heretofore virtualized. Of this minority, VMware owns about 35 to 40 percent based on the analyst you read. Their approach is not unique and they have competitors, including a little company called Microsoft, whose Hyper V seems to outperform ESX with Microsoft applications. I honestly doubt that there is a sustainable differentiator between any virtualization vendors in the x86 world going forward.
Thirdly, when I tell my audiences to use virtualization judiciously, it should not be interpreted to mean “Don’t use it at all.” Just as, when I tell my audiences, trust no vendor claims, test their products yourself and under your own workload in your own shop, it should not be interpreted to mean, “All vendors are lying to bilk you out of your money.” Well, maybe it should be interpreted to mean that in the case of a lot of storage and virtualization vendors.
I have recently had a lot of vendors pushing back on my statements, which they interpreted as offensive to their marketing messages. I think they are common sense.
Just a rant. Thanks for hearing me out.
March 21st, 2008 at 2:27 am
I must admit the I suffer the same disillusionment with virtualization and agree that it ignores 80% of the problem.
Some time ago I wrote http://thinkingproblemmanagement.blogspot.com/2008/01/counter-measures-to-bad-information.html
which is a very long list of things that piss me off. I used the same Sumo picture for explaining a Sumo marriage.
I think it is time to define a new bad practice, Dr 90210. The act of virtualizing IT infrastructure while maintaining the poor underlying service management processes.
March 21st, 2008 at 3:27 pm
Ok - that is one of the best analogies I have seen on thinking that virtualization will simplify everything…thanks for a good Friday laugh!
March 23rd, 2008 at 3:06 am
Jon - once again you are so spot on.
I too try to carry this message to the masses. Most vendors press the virtualization message because they know if they council people to manage what they already have, it will return too much wasted space back to the free pool, which will hurt their top line. As a result, they press the virtualization foo instead because it is frequently and incorrectly seen as the solution to storage management efficiency. Pity. The only value in disk storage virtualization is provisioning. While that is important, it is only a part of the storage management story, and it turns out to be nearly the last thing you do when getting storage management right.