Peter Christy

System Center -- Front and Center

I've been attending the Microsoft Management Summit for three years now and the evolution is worth watching. The management effort began in earnest five years ago when Bob Muglia faced the fact that manageability was a liability for Windows server and hired Kirill Tatarinov from BMC to fix the problem. Kirill and his team developed a 10 year vision around the "dynamic systems initiative." The initial reasoning for the effort was that with good systems management Windows Server could have superior overall cost-of-ownership compared to alternatives like LINUX. The management systems team developed a pretty good plan and Muglia put his money where his mouth was. I think it's fair to say that five years into this ten year plan systems management is now a Windows Server asset rather than a liability. A little over a year ago the discussion started to move to focus on System Center (the Microsoft branding for the whole product line) as a profitable line of business rather than just a Windows Server asset. From what we heard at MMS we're estimating that the product line will close this year just south of $1B certainly a credible number even within MS. Perhaps more interesting, System Center (in turn built on SQL Server) is becoming a focal point for the virtualization strategy (virtualization management integrated with hardware, operating system and application management in contrast to VMware's "virtualization is everything" strategy) and also now at the core of Microsoft's Forefront Security as well. Muglia still describes it as five years into a ten year vision, and speaks to more sophisticated model-based applications (I'm expecting that some of these ideas will become clearer in the forthcoming Oslo release). The analyst meetings at MMS are getting a lot more popular (they used to be intimate little events).

Plays well with the other children!

Cisco and Microsoft, each a powerful competitor and market leader have also shown that they can work together when so "encouraged" by their large mutual customers. The most impressive example at least in our bailiwick is the recent announcement of the addition of Windows Server services to Cisco WAAS acceleration appliances. In addition to "WAN acceleration" many customers need basic Windows services in branch offices, and the fact of the matter is that no one does Windows like Microsoft (I guess we shouldn't be surprised). So, leveraging virtualization, Cisco is supporting a virtualized version of Windows Server 2008 running as a guest O/S on top of the Cisco WAAS solution that is built on LINUX. Once enabled, these WS2008 guests are discoverable and manageable by Microsoft's System Center. This initial implementation is pragmatic and accomplished by use of the KVM module in LINUX rather than the virtualization of the WAAS system itself so further interesting shoes may yet fall. In the same timeframe Riverbed announced the Riverbed Services platform on a similar path. In the first release the RSP is even more pragmatic enabling the protected execution of LINUX code from partners, but the second phase due at the end of the year is said to be much like what Cisco has done.

Drew and Woz Meet Andy

As part of our data center networking investigations, we visited with Arastra, Andy Bechtolsheim's latest venture. Andy is one of the most remarkable Silicon Valley fixtures. Not only has he made a lot of money, but along the way he's done some extremely elegant product designs, often doing things simply better than others or doing things that others didn't think could be done (or hadn't thought of). Arastra looks like another winner. It's a 10G switch, and as such is in a category most will never think about but probably use every day. But for those who deal with it directly, it's another really elegant example of Andy's work as the picture below shows:

Arastra's first product is a 48 port 1RU device which is a packaging feat not unlike the Faberge Eggs that the Romanov's were so fond of. Just putting those 48 connectors in a 1U box and still having cooling work is pretty amazing to those practiced in the art. The Arastra switch is also interesting because it's a real deviation from a lot of Andy's early work where he used high complexity custom silicon to create a barrier to others to follow. The Arastra switch has none. Instead it leverages standard parts and creates differentiation through packaging. Steve Wozniak practiced similar art with the Apple II making amazingly clever use of standard parts while others piled on expense to do the same thing. Since hardware isn't the competitive barrier here it must be software. The Arastra switch is designed for the addition of third party software (or the adaptation of existing code into switch functionality). The base operating system of the switch is LINUX and then real-time capabilities are provided by an innovative NetWare like inner environment with a shared state repository providing a lot of the coordination. NetWare was a marvelous software system when Drew Major first created it 20+ years ago in order to make a MHz class PC serve as a high-performance I/O controller (today's multicore CPU's are maybe 5,000 times more powerful). High performance software designers rediscover NetWare regularly. It's sad we don't just teach it in school.