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VMware, Cisco Plan Data Center OS
Lucas123 writes "John Webster over at Computerworld says VMware and Cisco plan to develop a Data Center OS that would consist of a data center cloud populated by servers, storage, and Cisco's 'intelligent' networking gear, all managed by Cisco and its partners — starting with VMware."
UTILITY Computing, IBM's wet dream. Also, game hosting in the cloud. No more installing clients, you play in virtual clients. Game houses wet dream. Thin clients, Oracles wet dream.
http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm
IIRC, ESX only ships with linux in the service console. The actual vmkernel is not based on linux.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Take ZFS for filesystem clustering. Add Beowulf for processor clustering. Tip hat to 20-year-old VAXcluster technology, and 40-year-old IBM utility computing.
What am I missing, please? Apart from buzzwords like "cluster computing" and "intelligent gear".
The part that isn't so great about it is the "proprietary" part. I guess it depends on the implementation and how open the "standard" is. But having worked in IT for several years now, I've become increasingly convinced that closed standards and proprietary systems just aren't acceptable. What inevitably happens is that this terrific idea and great set of standards will work great... so long as you set everything up exactly the way the vendor wants. That usually includes throwing a large amount of money into buying other loosely related products from the same vendor, buying interacting products from the vendor's partners, and paying a shit-ton of money to the vendor's "certified" consultants. And then you're locked in, and you have to deal with that vendor's quirks and problems, or else pay all that money again to start the whole process over with a competing vendor.
And of course, the whole "standard" won't really be built to function optimally to solve the problem it's built to solve. It will have random bullshit built in to ensure that the standard can't be used by the vendor's competitors. They'll make sure the standard can't be used with anything other than "approved" hardware and software. The result of all that is that you can't use the product the way you want, and also that the product doesn't quite function properly because they're trying to keep you from doing what you want.
I guess I just question whether a proprietary standard should be considered a standard at all. I'm not against proprietary software, but I'm mighty tired of proprietary software developers refusing to use standards that allow their product to work with competing products. Maybe it's just me and I'm crazy or something, but free interoperability between systems always ends up being this huge hurdle to getting things done, and I'd hand over my money more readily if some proprietary software/hardware vendor would ease those problems instead of exacerbating them. Why don't these companies actually try making things easier for IT pros for a change, instead of just giving us some new complicated non-functional inconvenient POS to try to figure out?
(Sorry for the rant. I've had a bad month.)
Cisco might still be able to get away with having proprietary networking gear, but there is no way most organizations will move to proprietary for entire data centers.