"Part 4 of 6 "Virtualization Technology and Ecosystem Support"

     Earlier this summer we announced Intel's soon to be released Intel Xeon server product code named "Nehalem-EX" to the world. This is a breath-taking architecture that our engineers have been developing for several years. The performance improvements of this new platform are truly incredible. We really are looking forward to providing the industry with the specifics....

     However, the performance, the instrumentation and many of the features of this platform would not be available if not for a broad ecosystem (read village) of community support. I was able to get a sneak peek today of some of our reliability features in Nehalem-EX and cannot wait for the public to see these capabilities. The power management capabilities are capable of delivering huge ROI savings for consolidation of virtualized and non-virtual workloads. The memory capability up to 512GB is staggering. Does anyone remember when 512GB of Storage was considered impressive??

    One of the most rewarding aspects of these hardware capabilities is the ability of the virtualization industry to innovate software solutions for the data center around these new capabilities with technologies like SR-IOV, Machine-Check architectures and Dynamic Resource pooling. Without the help of VMWare, Microsoft, Citrix, Red Hat and Xen-community users would struggle to take advantage of these features in a real-tme automated deployment model.

   Beyond server this virtualization ecosystem is innovating client virtualization technologies, application virtualization and rapid application deployment models that are allowing for the ubiquity of virtualization technologies to permeate many different device form factors from the Data Center to the Desktop. This is compelling, innovative and delivers a high degree of ROI.

   At Intel, we have thousands of software developers who remind us everyday that it is sometimes easy to forget their contributions and those of their key ISV colleagues. In virtualization, we have not only come to appreciate them, we couldn't exist without them. In difficult financial and social times, it takes a village to build a viable, vibrant and innovative community. I personally look forward to catching up with all of my colleagues in virtualization at VMWorld and IDF (Intel's Developer Forum) over the next 45 days and thanking them for their wonderful committment to our joint efforts. It has been quite a ride so far and the best is.....is yet to be concieved.

The computer industry is filled with pundits, speculators, visionaries, salesman, brilliant architects and professors. Each provides invaluable insight into their experience, their intelligence, their alma mater, their ticker symbol, their ego and what’s next. Some win the “what’s next lottery”, others work for years of brilliance in relative obscurity.

Seemingly, a world that has deployed over 1 Billion devices a year for the last 3 years , is incapable of understanding the gravity of a new programming models, a new hardware architecture, a sleek new design that delivers on a vision that Gene Rodenberry thought of in the 1960’s or Da Vinci in the 15^th Century. What is old is new…..and let me tell you why? It will revolutionize the industry (not evolutionize…a term reserved for slower growing industry’s that require government assistant every decade or so…), transform your environment and provide freedoms you had only hoped to enjoy….and we invented it 40 years ago. Does any of this sound familiar?

It should. These are the paraphrased slogans of an industry in transition. Real products matters, product differentiation matters, standards matter, interoperability matters….and shareholders pay for future expectations.

The future of computing…is NOW. The future of the computer industry is NOW. The next generation of computer programming, software architectures and transformational technologies is NOW. As an industry we have finally begun to embrace interface, architectural and software programming standards to usher in a new era of interoperability and scalability. Behind us are the days of “proprietary interfaces” (What does that actually mean other than I am going to sell you some extra accessories that will be worthless in 2 years?), which do not provide a differentiated performance/cost advantage. Gone are the days of developing programming languages that lock-in customers to individual companies, whether vendors innovate or not. These rules of the past are slowly melting away, allowing the entire industry to embrace interoperability and standards at the highest level in history. Industry diversity is healthy and insures that the most innovative and technologically relevant companies will “win” most of the time. Allowing the 1 Billion and the Next Billion customers of the world to enjoy the best interface technology yet developed….each other.  It also provides us with a unique ability to move to the next phase in our dynamic industry’s growth, autonomic instrumentation.

At Intel, we are constantly working to develop the next great performance architecture, filled with new innovative “goodies”, as our Chief Virtualization Architect Rich Uhlig calls them. These “goodies” (a technical term that Rich borrowed from his nephew, I believe) come in the form of virtualization technologies (Intel VT-x, Intel VT-d and Intel VT-c), security technologies (Intel LT-SX), performance technologies (Hyper-Threading, Turbo Boost) and energy efficiency instrumentation (Node Manager and Data Center Manager). Soon they will also include differentiated services in the cloud which facilitate ease of use and growth for a host of vertical industries in need of innovation. The resulting architectures that emerge will be instrument rich, feature capable and as scalable as users are willing to pay for.

Why is this important? Instrumentation matters. As we apply business and personal rules to our growing compute environments it has become increasingly clear that the more tools we make available to users the better informed we are in making decisions. The more disclosure we provide to investors through the use of autonomic programming architectures the more informed they will be of their investing decisions.

How can you day trade $1B in 35 different stocks without clear autonomic controls in your data center, your database, your application and your client devices?

How can you move 450 Million people efficiecntly throughout a country for 2 weeks without autonomic controls on transportation: plains, trains, boats and automobiles, as they do during the Spring Festival in China?

How can you process 1 Billion text messages a day without clear business rules? What happens when these messages are also coming from machines to other machines, modifying databases, applications and clients?

As humans, we must apply guidelines, much like laws,  for our machines to take action when we are asleep, when we are tired, when we are not present, when we are just simply being human….to slow to react to a rapidly changing environment.

The innovators of the computer industry today understand this NOW. We do not need to discuss a vision of 40 years ago without a plan to act NOW. Claiming ideas without action is dishonorable at best, criminal at worst. The innovators of today must build products and services that help solve the problems of today. We do not need to look to 2050 without a plan to act NOW. The visionaries of tomorrow are…..not born. The visionaries of today…can call me in 10 years.

Autonomic controls are in place today, machine to machine computer architectures are here today, scalable compute engines are here today. Are they perfect, no. Are they effective, yes. The design architects, product engineers and systems designers of today need to address these concerns. Autonomic Instrumentation delivers control to the administrator, the user and the developer. Rules engines can be modified to maximize efficiency, minimize consumption and increase productivity. All of these will lead to increase shareholder (read: No just people who buy shares of stock) value across your enterprise, your school, our hospitals, our governments, and your home.

When executed properly, Autonomic controls should be able to deliver 20-25% performance and efficiency increases with each new generation of Moore’s law. In some cases, as in the Intel Xeon® 5500 Series these increases have been over 150% in virtualization performance, these increases will be a combination of software architecture enhancement and silicon optimization. In other cases, it will be through the dedicated hard work of increase instrumentation capability of a processor platform at the same price of the previous generation through energy efficiency and memory controls.

Autonomic controls will also allow end users to avert disasters in our data centers, our homes and in our hands. Autonomic instrumentation design frameworks, allow users to set parameters on data migrations, data backup, security, memory access, power consumption and virtual machine architectures.

For Intel and our new Xeon® 5500 Series processor family, and our recently announced

Intel® Nehalem-EX platform provide the new generation of platform instrumentation. As product developers, designers and architects we should all find a way to increase the tools available to our customers to take advantage of these instrumentation capabilities. I look forward to being able to announce more of these new features as we announce them and help to provide development frameworks for developers, engineers and architects to build new products and services, ushering in the future of autonomic computing innovation…today.

For those of us who have lived through the cyclical nature of Enterprise technology innovation, the last month has seen the public and private backlash of an "emerging" compute models, known as Cloud Computing. Industry veterans claiming marketing hype, others claiming leadership in this space and some committed to changing the landscape of computing have begun their public positioning of this new compute paradigm. So what has changed and why all the "backlash": I'll outline my thoughts, remind people of history and outline what I believe the future holds.

Why now?

1. Moore's Law, Metcalfe's Law and Buffett's law (I'll explain later).

A. Moore's law and the era of multi-core provides all of us in the industry the capability to grow our compute infrastructures in a more scalable, cost effective fashion then at anytime in the history of our industry. This isn't hype this is reality. We are delivering better than 2x the performance in our recently announced Intel Xeon 7400 series product than our Intel Xeon 7100 series product launched just 2 years ago. I might add that our Intel Xeon 7400 platform is the industry 1st 1 million tpm/c x86 architecture in history. Moore's law is alive and well. Perfectly suited for the Physical layer of Cloud Computing .

B. Ethernet performance and innovation has outstripped Fiber Channel and Infiniband in terms of innovation. This has allowed for a Gigabit revolution from Desktop to Data Center. The Gigabit revolution is driving a transformation of how communication networks are being built around the world. This law will be constant and Intel is committed to being a leader here as well.

(Note: I was the NUMA-Q systems architect for the 1st ever production fiber channel solution deployed for commercial use at the NASD in 1997 with EMC...at the time ethernet was a 10/100mb controller)

C. Buffett's Law: The value of an enterprise is a direct correlation of it's ability to deliver consistent return on invested capital, regardless of market conditions. Enterprises will/are being required to drive consistent returns with an intelligent, expandable and cost effective IT infrastructures. Information Technology leadership is key to all successful businesses in a global economy. Cloud computing has the potential to provide a flexible internal capability with external application growth capabilities. This is not yesterday's outsourcing models. Warren Buffett is driving change through value investing, this rewards the conservative innovator more than the flambouyant visionary of a "boom" cycle. I'm not sure he even understands the significance his investment models have begun to place on our industry...

2. Virtualization for x86 compute technologies. Over 80% of the world's server shipments.

A. Expansion of virtualization technologies to increase the utilization of the compute infrastructures has increased the flexibility of these environments. Introduction of flexible migration technologies for virtual machines provides meaningful cost savings for software licensing, energy efficiencies and scale for viral workloads.

B. Educating tomorrow's Web 2.0 innovators is easier on our platforms, compilers and technologies that are available in every market in the world....within state department allowed countries. :>

C. Broadband Access around the world. Wimax, 3G, Fiber to Home, xDSL and Cable...thanks!

3. Google's Law: Viral IS the market.

A. Our children fortunate enough to afford access, live in a online world where Viral isn't a sickness. Communities expand and contract based upon their ability to meet the needs of their constituency. John Stuart Mill would be proud.

B. Cloud Computing provides the necessary compute infrastructure for tomorrow's software artists to build a community in their own likeness, even the founders of Google are growing increasingly out of touch as they grow older.

What's different from the past?

1. Clusters aren't a requirement. Cluster technologies are difficult to manage, administer and unpredictable. In addition their software licensing costs have been traditionally prohibitive for wide-scale deployment across an enterprise.

2. Intel's compute requirements and capabilities are as never before. See above or visit www.intel.com

3. Client/Server architectures, Open Source and Web 2.0 have unlocked a world of programming models capable of acting different.

4. It has been 10 years since Siebel Net, the 1st Client Server ASP, was architected from a deal between Tom Seibel and Casey Powell....yes it was ground breaking and no it didn't make a lot of money....but it did spark an industry that has given us Salesforce.com, Corio, OracleOnline and others. We designed these infrastructures knowing they had meaningful limitations yet with the industry's best technology available at the time. We have had a first act.

5. Latency improvements has reduced virtual machine migration to minutes and application deployment models from weeks to hours. As we decrease the latencies of the physical layer from minutes to milliseconds across cpu, memory, networking and storage we are providing the basis for breakthrough programming models such as Cloud Computing.

What does the future hold?

My Top 9 predictions....(time for the station announcement....these opinions are not necessarily opinions of Intel, the opinion expressed below are the author.)

1. Cloud Computing infrastructures will provide the basis for a new compute and development infrastructures that will allow the world's smartest technologists to have access to more compute resources than they have ever been able to afford. The cloud will provide breakthrough research in the following areas in the next 5 years: DNA mapping, FDA regulation, Energy Consumption and Exploration modeling, Retail Supply Chain, High Definition Content Creation and Human Rights.

2. Cloud Computing will deliver the most consistent, scalable and available compute infrastructure ever created. Translation...there is failure, there is not downtime. It will also mark the end of Tape backup technologies and proprietary storage interfaces over the next decade. I'm not sure why we need clustering technology in the future either but...that is the subject for another blog.

3. Cloud Computing will make device compute capabilities even more important than they are today. The easier the access to high value content the more important the compute capabilities of the end user device to enjoy the content.

4. Cloud Computing will change the Entertainment Industry over the next 5 years. More access, more distribution, less cost, more profits with less risk.

5. Cloud computing will have the single biggest effect on traditional software licensing models of any environemental change in our industry. More of an impact than Multi-Core, Clustering or Google.

6. Cloud Computing will drive innovation and interoperability. Innovation in programming models for business and consumer applications. Interoperability across the physical, application and user interface layers of a cloud infrastructure.

7. Cloud Computing infrastructures will consume up to 50% of all x86 server CPU cycles by 2016.

8. Whichever entrepeneurs emerge as the leaders of the "Age of Cloud Computing" will be the technically most well-rounded technologists our industry has ever created. Hopefully, they will be equally well-rounded in their business planning processes.

9. Cloud Computing will begin to unearth a global data standards initiative. As an industry we will have to work with the regulatory leadership around the world to define acceptable and secure standards of data integrity across Cloud infrastructures.

For the non-believers...I must apologize. Explanations I can give, understanding I cannot. Cloud Computing is not a fad. it is a desired state of end users who face real business challenges with unpredictable compute requirements, budgets and human resources.

Where there are clouds there is usually rain.....

This week at Intel, we will host several thousand of the world's foremost software and hardware developers in San Francisco at our triannual Intel Developers Forum. It is an event that requires months of planning, years of product development and countless debates within our company. For many of us, Intel Developers Forum is a culmination of our lives work and committment to technology innovation. Intel has been hosting this event for 11 years and over those 11 years we have remained committed to providing the best venue possible for our colleagues in the industry. Each year we announce new technologies, introduce new products, technology usage models and provide our opinion on the direction of the technology industry. As an Intel employee this event serves as a tremendous source of pride for the hardwork and imagination of our engineers, manufacturing geniuses and executive leadership. It also provides us with a chance to continue to learn from the rest of the industry. I would also like to point out it is an opportunity for our customers, colleagues and developers to let us know when we have missed the mark.

Too much communication and collaboration is NOT always a good thing.

What continues to strike me (humble me as well) is the continued drive of the technology industry to innovate, problem solve and deliver the best products the world has ever seen, regardless of the profit motive. I would hope other industries would embrace a similar model of rewarding innovation and ingenuity....

As the world (and Intel) tranforms our technology infrastructure from static, immobile, expensive and exclusive to mobile, collaborative, inexpensive and inclusive it becomes critical for all of us in the industry to define architectural transitions that take advantage of this paradigm shift. Virtualization can certainly play a key role in enabling more mobile application deployments, more collaborative operating system environments, faster time to production for applications and better use of energy resources. It also has the potential to be a new frontier of collaborative innovation. Utlizing more compute, I/O and storage resources across a broader range of applications in a reduced carbon footprint. Reducing our mutual dependencies on any single source of software, hardware and carbon emitting suppliers. With time, it may even allow us to share compute resources with our suppliers and/or colleagues seamlessly and securely. From mobile phone to mobile internet devices to desktop to servers to mainframes and a host of additional embedded applications (think ATM, Food Dispensers, Checkout stands, Gas Pumps, etc), Virtualization with secure authentication could facilitate an interesting array of application usages for all consumers in the Global economy. It is not a Panacea, to heal all wounds of the industry, but merely a facilitating technology capable of providing a collaborative underpinning for the technological world we have become. What is possible and what is here today are obviously not always aligned in time or execution. Yet, I am always excited when any technology (from anyone and particularly Intel) has the ability to bring us more efficient use of our limited carbon footprint, limited time on the planet and sets the table for a world of autonomic continuity in which servers, desktops or devices don't "die"....they are simply retired.

I can only hope our former Chairman, the illustrious Andy Grove, was mistaken when he coined the term "Only the paranoid survive". I am of the opinion that survival is not enough, it is thriving and innovation which move us forward, breeds new ideas, new usages, new applications and new languages for us all to enjoy.

I welcome your comments, thoughts and ideas....

Data Center Innovation: Is Virtualization the latest hype or a key step forward in Data Center transformation?

Members of the technology development community, sometimes take the press at face value. In other cases, we accept the press, new media and old, for what they are, journalists. Journalists ultimately commissioned to sell eyeballs and provoke "cocktail chatter" over their brilliant prose. The question that it has always left upon me, as a member of this community of technology developers, do they really understand what we do? Do they understand or even care about the countless hours required to think of the next great technological innovation, determine the markets for its application, build an ecosystem to sustain, and continue to innovate in the face of dwindling profits and increasing competition. Clayton Christenson calls this the "Innovator's Dilemma"....though I am not sure he has ever felt the "sting" of the dilemma....better to write the story then live through it I suppose.

Virtualization has become the latest "grist" for the technology journalist "mill". VMWare, a 7-year "overnight" success story, led by the engineering team of Mendel Rosenblum, Steve Herrod and their "Captain" Diane Greene, has captured the industry's imagination and begun to transform Data Centers around the world. This team has innovated for years behind a simple premise to enable x86 servers to be logically replicated as much as and as many times as the compute cycles will allow. Many have argued they are replicating innovation that's been done on mainframes for years and to a certain extent,...they are right. Does that make the technology advances in hypervisor development and Data Center efficiency LESS innovative? No, in my opinion, innovation is different from pioneering. The current wave of Virtualization innovators, (VMWare, Virtual Iron, SWSoft, Novell, Oracle, Sun, Microsoft, 3Leaf Systems, Citrix, etc.) owe a strong legacy to pioneers of the Atlas Project in 1961 and IBM for innovating "time sharing" and resource pooling concepts over 40 years ago. However, their innovation have exceeded far beyond the basic concepts of "logical partitioning" of compute processes to include virtual machine motioning from a single physical server to another, resource scheduling and log file innovation for higher availability and the ability to be operating system "lite" for rapid application deployment. These innovations are reducing Data Center costs as much as 50-70% in some cases. What is compelling is that these new group of innovators are transforming the traditional client/server software development models for both IT enterprises and independent software vendors.

At Intel, we spend a great deal of our time developing silicon innovations in virtualization and we are once again pushing the "innovation paradigm" by extending virtualization innovation to chipset, networking and I/O technologies. Server Platform Virtualization (processor, chipset and I/O virtualization) has benefits for the industry, software developers and individual IT managers. For the industry, it facilitates a discussion between Intel and our competitors to drive the standards and best practices discussion to deliver virtualization capabilities with meaningful impact, such as the work we are doing with PCI-SIG around I/O virtualization. For software developers Server Platform Virtualization provides opportunities for innovation and new usage models for graphics virtualization, business continuity and storage management. The IT manager realizes all of these benefits by enjoying a reduced cost deployment infrastructure, ease of use in integrated management tools and increased efficiency on power requirements. Enough benefit, enough innovation to keep the "hype machine" alive and for good reason.

What does this mean? In my opinion, Virtualization is BOTH the latest hype machine for the industry and the 1^st meaningful step towards Data Center innovation in a decade. The combination of virtualization technology, multi-core energy efficient processors technologies and 10GB+ networking infrastructure will transform the way we view Data Centers, both physically and logically over the next 5 years. Beyond 2012, innovators will still face "our dilemma", journalists will find the next article to write/hype and the pioneers will (hopefully) be debating the initial findings of their 1^st personal quantum computer, and many of us will be determining how to incorporate yet another key innovation into our lives in the Data Center.

For a popular history of virtualization:

http://www.kernelthread.com/publications/virtualization/

For the less popular version and TCO calculator:

http://www.vmware.com/overview/history.html

For additional Intel resources:

http://www.intel.com/technology/platform-technology/virtualization/