The Pervasive Data Center

More and more of our computing happens through applications and Web sites out in the network. It's in the "cloud" to use the current trendy lingo.

One consequence is that we're starting to look at our clients differently. That's because they're increasingly a sort of window into the cloud rather than devices that run a lot of application-specific code and store a lot of application-specific data locally. Clients can therefore be "thinner," which is to say loaded with less software and less tailored to the needs and wants of a given user. Resources and customization live out in the network instead.

Even with more conventional operating systems such as Windows, Linux, or OS X, running applications in the network reduces the time spent installing and upgrading applications on our proliferating collection of clients. Google's Chrome OS takes the concept to the next level and essentially reimagines the client OS for a cloud world.

However, the real world is messier and more complicated than "Just run everything in a browser." That's true today and will almost certainly be true to at least some degree next month and next year. Ultimately, this question of how thin clients can become as a practical matter is going to play a big role in how accepted certain models of computing will become.

To illustrate, consider a PC that is today mostly used to go online. There's more than just an OS and a basic browser involved.

There are plug-ins and extensions for the browser. There's probably an IM client; Meebo is a Web-based alternative but most people run a local client. If you use Twitter, there's a good chance you run an application like TweetDeck or Seesmic, which may in turn require Adobe's AIR runtime. Third-party media applications such as Apples iTunes are commonplace. Google Earth, Windows Live Writer...This list goes on--and will vary by user--of the applications and components that have to be installed and updated for even a rather bare-bones PC configuration.

And that's before we even broach device drivers or other software that may be required to connect a camera, a microphone, or some other peripheral.

My overarching point here is not that a thinner client model is uninteresting. I strongly believe that it is meant not to replace traditional fat clients but to augment them. Today, I have a notebook that is essentially used only to go online yet I still have all the administration associated with a full-blown PC.

However, the challenge for Google and others is to steer a course that creates an "Internet computer" that is legitimately better in that role than a full-fledged PC while retaining sufficient customization. Application stores may be part of the answer. HTML 5 will likely also help by making browsers more capable of running applications.

Whatever the specific technical solutions though, the answer will involve a lot of careful thought about balancing simplification and flexibility.

Last week's virtual version of the roaming CloudCamp conference was a good opportunity to check the pulse of cloud computing's evolution.

It struck me that we continue to see two very different groups of attendees at events such as this.

One is the "clouderati," the vendors involved with cloud computing in some form or another, and sophisticated users who grok cloud computing and its implications for their organization. This crowd is so past definitional debates and analogies to the electrical grid. They just want to get on with specific issues--such as dealing with audit requirements in a world where you increasingly can't just walk into a datacenter and point to the physical server where an application is running.

The other group is still a bit fuzzy on the general concept. Does cloud computing just mean Amazon Web Services? Where does software as a service fit? Is it just a load of hype? Is it safe?

It's not hard to understand why there is a fair bit of confusion. Cloud computing has become a sort of blanket term for where computing is going. Think of it as a synonym for "computing.next." It represents a shift to an operational model in which applications don't live out their lives on a specific piece of hardware and in which resources are more flexibly deployed than was the historical norm.

Cloud computing is therefore not a single technology or even a single approach but rather a collection of technologies and approaches that collectively represent the direction that computing is headed. I see nothing wrong with this. Many of the benefits espoused for these new approaches to computing are genuine. To the degree that "cloud computing" offers a convenient rallying point to get users headed there, that seems for the good.

But specific things are easier to grapple with than general paradigms. And cloud computing started life as something fairly narrow as articulated in author Nick Carr's The Big Switch. (The irony is that, not only is the cloud computing concept bigger than the Big Switch concept of a few, huge mega-service providers, it now seems unlikely that the degree of centralization and fundamental change in economic model envisioned by Carr will happen any time soon.) Whereas today, we see cloud computing used sometimes to mean computing.next and sometimes to mean a specific technology approach that someone is either promoting or denigrating.

Cloud computing incorporates and makes use of many individual sharply-defined techs of course. But, increasingly, think of the broad term as applying to a way of thinking about computing rather than the specifics of how it's done.

It used to be that system management products were for the care and feeding of individual servers. They could deal with many of them, sure, and might even have had tools aimed at automating repetitive operations. But, fundamentally, they mostly looked at systems in isolation.

Enterprise management tools, on the other hand, looked at the IT infrastructure big picture. Sophisticated and complex, tools like CA's Unicenter, HP's OpenView, and IBM's Tivoli were the aggregation point for alerts and reports about the health of an organization's IT. But they rarely actually did anything; they watched for problems but it was other software or system administrators that had to actually swing into action.

The bottoms-up orientation of system management tended to win out over time. Enterprise management was never displaced--exactly. But it did long seem as if many of the products in the enterprise management space sat far from where the interesting action was in the data center.

However, today, we're seeing a shift to system management that happens at the level of the data center as a whole or at least a virtualized pool of systems and applications. Virtualization is one of the drivers here. Another is "private clouds" or, if you prefer, a more dynamic and services-oriented view of IT resources.

As a result, system management products are starting to take on more and more of the roles that were traditionally associated with enterprise management. We're also seeing systems management meet enterprise management in the middle, so to speak. IBM's VMControl announcement on October 20 is a case in point.

As IBM puts it in their release: "VMControl allows combinations of physical and virtual IBM servers to be managed as a single entity. This approach--known as system pooling--expands the benefits of virtualization by helping corporate data centers simplify complex management functions and better share and prioritize use of critical resources such as processing power, memory and storage."

The new product, IBM Systems Director VMControl Enterprise Edition, is focused on virtualized environments. It supports IBM's PowerVM and z/VM as well as x86 virtualization technologies such as VMWare, Hyper-V and open x86 virtualization solutions. IBM plans to first offer it on IBM Power Systems running AIX in December, 2009 with other platforms coming next year.

VMControl Enterprise Edition works in concert with Tivoli; IBM also announced "a new version of Tivoli Provisioning Manager that provides enhanced automation of the manual tasks of provisioning and configuring servers, operating systems, middleware, software applications, storage and network devices." As I've discussed previously, Tivoli is very much a central part of how IBM views cloud computing and therefore how it thinks about the evolution of the enterprise data center.

PowerVM itself, as its full name implies, is part of IBM's Systems Director family. This is IBM's systems management portfolio; rough counterparts are HP Systems Insight Manager, Dell OpenManage, and Sun xVM Ops Center. Systems Director has been the recipient of considerable development and marketing attention in recent years that have greatly improved its integration across IBM's disparate product lines as well as its overall functionality.

Virtualization is no longer just about server consolidation. It does that, sure, and thereby reduces the number of physical servers that an organization needs to purchase. But, especially in enterprises, it's increasingly as much about resource pools and services (such as disaster recovery) enabled by virtualization as it is about consolidation. And that makes the need for management more rather than less.

Downtime is bad enough. But it's a really bad day when you lose data.

We've seen much gnashing of teeth over Microsoft's loss and slow recovery of data stored on T-Mobile Sidekicks. In its latest update, Microsoft says: "We continue to make steady progress, and we hope to be able to begin restoring personal contacts for affected users this week, with the remainder of the content (photographs, notes, to-do-lists, marketplace data, and high scores) shortly thereafter.

But data loss problems are hardly unique to Microsoft.

Social-bookmarking service Magnolia suffered a complete and largely unrecoverable corruption of its database back in March. Cloud storage provider SwissDisk is the latest to suffer a hardware failure related to data storage.

The company writes: "To prevent any future outages SwissDisk management has signed a contractual service agreement with a $40B company. For the first time this will enable SwissDisk to provide our customers with a 99.95 percent service level agreement. SwissDisk users will enjoy the peace of mind that comes with access to a truly world class, internationally deployed, multi-million dollar, extremely resilient storage infrastructure and internet network."

One would have thought that such risk mitigation procedures would have been better implemented before an outage occurred rather than after. A saying about barn doors and horses comes to mind. But be that as it may, what do these sorts of failures say about cloud-based storage in general? Certainly these sorts of problems are among the poster children that get trotted out when people want to take swipes at cloud storage.

I don't buy claims that these incidents make any sort of statement about cloud storage in the general case. They do however suggest some things to think about when we're considering storing data with third parties.

Reliability requirements both in terms of data access and, ultimately, how willing you are to tolerate loss even as a rare event. It's tempting to glibly state that "nothing's perfect" and at some level that truism is hard to dispute. However, as a practical matter, IT systems can be made very, very robust and reliable with many layers of fallback and protection in place. Think of the systems and networks used for stock transactions for example.

However, as Cisco's Christofer Hoff notes: "Utility, cost efficiencies, convenience trump security, privacy and even (degraded) availability. Cloud doesn't escape that logic." In other words, if you want those layers of fallback and protection, you have to pay for them. Security also often has usability tradeoffs but that's a discussion for another time.

Transparency. That said, one of the issues today is that it's often difficult for the buyers of cloud services to evaluate the back-end procedures that are in place to safeguard data and enhance availability. To be sure, it will always be partly a matter of trust that "best practices" are in place; gear by itself isn't enough. But the view into how data is being stored and protected even at a gross level is often limited at best.

Primary vs. secondary. When we're talking about data storage specifically, one important distinction is whether you're using cloud storage to preserve your only copy of important data or whether it's for backups--or even an offsite copy of an onsite backup. Reliability still matters in any case. If a backup is lost, there's a vulnerability window until it can be restored. And, of course, you need assurance that a valid data backup exists at all.

However, in general, service provider failures that involve only copies of data don't have the same impact as when they involve the only copy of your information. In the latter case, understanding a service provider's procedures becomes especially important. Indeed, in many cases, prudence suggests storing another copy onsite or with an alternate provider.

The specifics will depend on a great many factors. They will be familiar to anyone versed in backup and archive procedures. As with many things, cloud computing does represent changes to the way that companies and individuals are doing IT. But much remains the same.

The debate over single-function server appliances versus general-purpose servers is a long-standing one.

Appliances first came onto the scene in the late 1990s during the first Internet boom. They focused on a particular task, such as Web serving, and were designed to be ready to install with minimum muss, fuss, or skill. This assembly line approach to server farms was to be the secret sauce that made possible infinite growth without infinite IT staff.

Cobalt Networks was perhaps the best known and most sophisticated of the companies to offer appliances. Sun Microsystems later acquired Cobalt and then failed to successfully integrate it. This arguably presaged the mixed history of subsequent Sun acquisitions in general. But it also highlighted how server appliances remained much more of a niche than envisioned by their more vocal proponents.

The knocks on server appliances then and now haven't changed much. EMC Global Marketing CTO Chuck Hollis lays out some of the negatives in a recent post.

It's not the first big appliance that causes the problem, it's when you have a fleet of them that you realize you've traded one class of headache for another.

None of them are built the same way. None of them manage the same way. None of them are supported the same way. None of them know how to work together in a cooperative fashion, and so on.

Want standardization at the different layers of an architectural stack? Sorry.

Want a pool of resources that can flow and flex to support whatever workload is at hand? Sorry, can't do.

Want to use the latest-greatest infrastructure technology from (choose your favorite vendor here)? Sorry about that as well.

Hollis sums up his case as follows: "You can see the nature of the trade-off, can't you? It's basically trading immediate gratification for a specific project versus creating long-term value through IT infrastructure."

EMC's interest in this debate is twofold.

The first is to push the notion of virtual appliances, pre-built virtual machine images that can be deployed on a virtual infrastructure. The idea is that an IT department can buy or build an encapsulated stack of software for a particular function and then deploy it across a server infrastructure of their own choosing. Given that EMC owns about 90 percent of VMware, its interest in promoting additional reasons to deploy server virtualization is obvious.

Virtual appliances also have a close affinity to cloud-computing infrastructure as a service. Amazon Machine Images (AMI) are a form of virtual appliance. And EMC is moving in this direction as well with Atmos.

The second reason that we see Chuck Hollis pushing back on the appliance concept is that we're seeing other large and powerful vendors, his competitors, promoting it. As opposed to the appliances of the Internet boom that mostly focused on network functions, this round is also, or even primarily, about heavy-duty business applications.

Oracle's Exadata is perhaps the canonical example of today's "Big Appliance," as Hollis phrases it. However, IBM has its own take on deploying and operating complex workloads such as business analytics. These may not be cookie-cutter appliances like a firewall or a Web server appliance. The tasks in question are too complex for that.

But they still bring together hardware and software from a single vendor and bundle them together. The marketing literature legitimately couches this integration in terms of customer benefits such as optimization. But such bundles also, and certainly not incidentally, increase a vendor's footprint and reduce the opportunity for others to capture a slice of the pie.

NEW YORK--It was a larger and cheerier crowd that attended this year's Red Hat's analyst day at the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday.

That shouldn't be surprising. At last year's meeting on October 7, Red Hat management had the dubious honor of ringing the closing bell on a day that saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average drop over 500 points.

This meeting took place in a time of what's probably best described as cautious optimism about the state of the economy. And in the context of Red Hat financial results that have continued to show growth at a time when so many companies in IT industry and elsewhere have not.

For the quarter ending August 31, its profit jumped 37 percent relative to the year-ago quarter, besting analyst estimates.

The day included a fair bit of discussion related to financial minutiae, as you'd expect for an event pitched primarily for financial analysts. However, it also included an overview of Red Hat's strategy and its technical direction. Here are a few things that caught my eye.

Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat's CEO, spent a fair bit of time talking about what boils down to fine-tuning of its go-to-market execution such as:

• Value of subscription. This includes what he called "education and compliance," essentially a euphemism for getting people using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) without paying for it to purchase a subscription. It also encompasses improving renewal rates for those cases where RHEL has been preloaded by a system builder and bringing a greater focus to articulating the value of RHEL relative to free substitutes such as CentOS.
• Routes to market. This refers to a continued build-out of the channel so that system integrators and others who recommend and install systems for less sophisticated customers will specify Red Hat as part of their solution. This stands in contrast to how, historically, Red Hat was mostly pulled into accounts by technically-savvy users and IT departments.

The message I took away from this is that Whitehurst isn't looking to change Red Hat's direction in any major way but sees a fair number of areas where more focused execution could lead to financial improvements. Later in the day, we also heard that Red Hat is taking a more systematic approach to which products it allocates development dollars for work such as internationalization.

For his part, Paul Cormier, executive vice president of products and technologies, reiterated Red Hat's belief that virtualization (which should be taken as hypervisor in this context) belongs in the operating system. This argument has been in evidence for a while as my fellow analyst Stephen O'Grady discussed after last year's event. 

It stands in stark contrast to VMware's desire to make the operating system irrelevant. Or, to put it another way, VMware's ambition to make the VMware ESX and ESXi hypervisors the model for a new type of operating system. This is too fraught a debate to tackle here; I largely agree with Stephen's take in his post.

However, one of the interesting outcomes of this battle is that Red Hat has been cozying up to Microsoft, the other big gun on the "hypervisors belong in the OS" side. This includes Red Hat's announcement Wednesday "that customers can now deploy fully supported virtualization environments that combine Microsoft Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux."

This sort of interoperability is certainly a customer desire and both Red Hat and Microsoft can legitimately present it in those terms without anyone smirking. However, the enemy of my enemy is also my friend, at least up to a point.

I also took note that Red Hat finally seems to be making some progress on the management front.

The product in question is RHEV Manager (RHEV-M); it's covered in detail in this video from the Red Hat Summit in September and is currently being tested by customers.

One reason I think it's important is that Red Hat apparently, if belatedly, recognizes that it is. CTO Brian Stevens admitted that RHEV-M "has been a huge missing ingredient."

The one customer speaker at the analyst day was Dave Costakos of Qualcomm and he focused on his company's experiences with testing RHEL-based virtualization and the associated RHEV Manager which he describes as "hits the mark."

I caught up with Dave at a break to get a bit more detail. He told me that they wanted a Web-based interface, which RHEV Manager has. He also liked the integration with Active Directory and other directory systems, and the role-based access controls. He said that it could perform the provisioning operations that Qualcomm requires and otherwise meets their needs.

Management has historically been a relatively weak part of Red Hat's offering that was mostly focused on updating packages. This is really a reflection of the broader Linux and open-source ecosystem in general. Projects like Nagios and, more recently, GroundWork notwithstanding, management doesn't play well to the strengths of open source. It touches too many parts of an IT infrastructure and requires too much cooperative work with the vendors making the things that need to be managed.

It's reasonable to ask whether Red Hat is too late to win big with RHEV Manager and its associated KVM-based virtualization play. But it had to attack management from some angle unless it was prepared to just cede that area of differentiation and potential point of control to system makers and others.

Finally, no technology discussion today would be complete without at least a mention of cloud computing. Brian Stevens jokingly called it a "shiny thing that people are looking at how to monetize."

The cloud discussion covered several angles, not least of which was standardization efforts such as Deltacloud. Like most other standardization efforts, this focuses on what is often called Infrastructure-as-a-Service; Amazon EC2 and S3 are perhaps the best known examples. Stevens admitted that it's going to be much harder to define a standard set of higher-level services (platform as a service in the vein of Microsoft Azure) that are portable.

Red Hat's distinctive play in the infrastructure cloud essentially circles back to its approach to virtualization. In cloud infrastructure as imagined by Red Hat, the operating system matters in important ways.

That's because applications matter; indeed, applications are ultimately what matter most. And in on-premise computing, one of Red Hat's greatest values and differentiators is the vast number of certified applications that it runs. This certification matters to users because, if they encounter a problem, it means that they can call the application vendor to get support. Otherwise, they'd get a "sorry, that's not a supported configuration."

One can argue whether the software layering of which the historical operating system is a part is the most appropriate choice for cloud computing. Fellow CNET blogger James Urquhart dives deeply into this topic in a pair of recent posts.

However, whether it's the way it should be or not, it is for now. And for Red Hat to be able to enable users to carry the certification of applications into a cloud model is a significant differentiation.

SAN FRANCISCO--General manager of Intel Architecture Group Sean Maloney's announcement of a reference design for a "micro server" during his Tuesday afternoon keynote at the Intel Developer Forum brought me a sense of deja vu.

Intel's Sean Maloney holding microserver.

(Credit: Intel)

He disclosed "a new ultra-low-voltage Intel Xeon 3000 series processor featuring a TDP (Thermal Design Power) of only 30 watts. To complement the broad range of dense and power-optimized platform offerings, Intel also demonstrated publicly for the first time a single-socket 'micro server' reference system which will help enable micro server innovation and future specification." Intel plans to ship the 30-watt dual-core chip in Q1 on 2010; a 45-watt quad-core version is set to ship immediately.

A reference system is primarily intended to demonstrate a concept. It provides a hands-on experience for partners and customers and therefore an opportunity to experiment with and fine-tune the basic approach. The microserver reference design will accommodate 16 server modules in a 5U-high (8.75-inch) chassis. The server boards are approximately 8-inches by 4.5-inches.

Jason Waxman, the general manager of high density computing at Intel, told me that they see the primary target for this class of system as "hosting companies that do a lot of white boxes." White boxes are systems that are often assembled in-house from component parts such as motherboards and cases. Waxman added that such companies nonetheless want many of the features associated with servers--such as memory with error correcting code (ECC).

In Intel's view of the world, microservers very much target service providers and companies that host busy Web sites and otherwise are associated with high-scale network computing. It sees this market as distinct from large high-performance computing (HPC) installations. Vendors such as HP tend to treat network computing and HPC as more of an overlapping customer group.

My deja vu when it comes to microservers relates to the fact that we've seen them before. They used to be called blades.

That's not to say that blade servers don't already exist today, but they've largely evolved into a much different concept from how they were initially conceived. The blades sold today by the likes of Cisco, Dell, HP, and IBM are about virtualization and integration. They pull together computing, networking, and storage and tightly integrate them both physically and through software. They are, in a sense, a form of scale-out consolidation.

Sun has largely eschewed this integration with their blade product line. However, Sun blades are heavily focused on high-performance computing--even to the point of integrating the HPC-centric InfiniBand interconnect on some of its products.

Rather, microservers hark back to the days of RLX Technologies, the company that did the most to promote blade servers during the Internet boom of circa 2000. Microservers are simply thin servers--compact, cheap, and simple. They provide cable simplification. They let hosting providers allocate low-cost physical servers to customers who don't want to share using virtualization.

Microservers bring blades back to their roots. Everything old is new again.

I visited my dad in Maine over the weekend and, as is often the case, part of the weekend was devoted to "IT administration," aka attending to PCs and associated gadgetry.

While some of the time involved transferring photos among various devices, a decent chunk was devoted to working on a PC whose operating system had decided to irretrievably corrupt itself somehow, requiring a fresh rebuild. And, yes, it was Windows--Windows XP to be precise--but please don't try to tell me that this sort of thing never happens with your favorite OS of choice.

This story isn't about Windows; it's about the inherent complexity of PCs of all stripes with locally installed and administered software. And this, to basically look at photos, play solitaire, and read e-mail through a browser.

The frustrating thing to me is that we basically know how to deal with this problem. It just isn't implemented in anything approaching a widespread way. It's also an approach that various people have been bringing up off and on for years. Take this article by Rupert Goodwins from ZDNet in 2004.

This solution is delivering a hosted desktop over broadband to a client device offered as part of an ISP's service. In other words, for some additional monthly fee, you'd rent a thin client from Comcast or Verizon just as you can rent a DVR today. They'd give you a standard desktop image along with a profile that could be personalized (including your desktop background) and space for your user data. They'd back up the whole thing and would be able to restore to the standard desktop image in the event of problems.

The thin client doesn't even need to be a desktop. Mobile thin clients are also readily available. It would have no local storage--that is, no local hard disk to crash.

There are various wrinkles that service providers would need to work out--such as dealing with additional applications that users might want to install and drivers for locally attached USB devices such as printers.

But we, as an industry, know how to do this. Desktone is one company that offers what it calls Desktops-as-a-Service. Essentially, it sells software that enables enterprises and service providers to build a hosted desktop infrastructure.

Service providers can then resell these hosted desktops to others. For example, in April Desktone announced a deal with ICC Global hosting around offering cloud-based virtual hosted desktops based on the Desktone Virtual-D Platform to organizations in the academic, public sector, and mid-tier business markets.

So hosted desktops, which you can think of as a cloud-computing-oriented implementation of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) are real. They just haven't made it out to consumers in anything approaching a widespread way.

Such a service wouldn't be for everyone--or even most. Many are more than willing to trade off the sometimes frustrating complexities of a full-fledged PC for the flexibility it brings. (Although I do wonder if it wouldn't be interesting for a supplemental device intended primarily for browsing even in a house with one or more PCs.)

But it does seem to me as if the cable and telecommunications companies have fallen down when it comes to offering what could be a very useful service for many. And, not incidentally, one they could charge an additional fee for--something that they're never shy about doing.

VMworld, which took place last week in San Francisco, was hopping.

In fact, the number of attendees appeared to overwhelm many of the conference's educational labs in the early going. And the many vendors I spoke with at the event were happy about their booth traffic and the show in general. Now that I've had a bit of time to digest and distill three days of whirlwind activity, five points stick with me:

1. We're seeing virtualization--as technology, products, and solution sets--start to mature in many respects. Or at least the current phase of it. Fellow analyst Judith Hurwitz described how she "was left with the feeling that we are in between generations of technology at this year's VMworld."

For me, this conclusion comes out of the observation that there was relatively little on display related specifically to server virtualization that was fundamentally new and different. That's not to suggest a lack of vendor activity. Anything but. However, the activity largely took the form of new iterations and building out on existing templates.

2. Legitimate cloud computing was much in evidence. But, my, the cloud washing was fierce. Many, many companies offering management and other products relating to virtualized infrastructure were eager to present themselves as playing in the nebulously defined "private cloud" space.

VMware itself was as guilty as anyone. With the latest version of its virtual infrastructure product, now dubbed vSphere, already launched back in April, VMware's focus at the show tilted heavily toward cloud computing.

While there were a few specifics, such as vCloud Express, much of this took the form of forward-looking generalities. For example, VMware gave a lot of airtime to the notion of hybrid clouds that bridge private and public networks even though this is largely an architectural theory at this point.

3. So was anything both new and real? Yes. A couple things. One was I/O virtualization, which can be thought of conceptually as separating computing from I/O (network and storage connections mostly) and allowing that I/O to be shared and dynamically allocated. It's not really a new concept. Like many things, it has its roots in the mainframe and has, more recently, found a home in blade designs from the likes of Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM.

However, the current crop of products are intended to work with standard rackmount or blade servers. Xsigo uses InfiniBand-based technology. Virtensys, Aprius, and NextIO essentially just bring PCI Express out of the server. This is a relatively young technology area but one worth watching.

4. Client-side virtualization was also a hot area even with Citrix and Microsoft--in many respects the top dogs in this space--in semi-exile from the show.

It's an exciting and evolving landscape with many new approaches and products. This includes work on protocols to improve the user experience over network connections of different types; Wyse, once exclusively a thin client purveyor, is now heavily focused here. We're also seeing a general trend toward making more effective use of the processor and graphics resources on the client rather than making the server and network do all the work; Wanova is a start-up that made an announcement shortly before the show in this area.

5. My last takeaway is a sort of meta point. The way that we do computing is changing in rather significant ways and virtualization--together with its related but distinct cousin, cloud computing--is at the focus of that change.

This is fundamentally a change in how we operate computer systems rather than, say, how we write software for them. However, because it ultimately affects how applications get delivered and computing is accessed, it has far broader implications than for just data center operators.