I was talking last week with a customer recently about power requirements in their co-location facility. I am sure it does not come as a shock to most that the biggest problem and cost facing data centers is not space but rather power. Despite all of our green efforts computer equipment continues to suck a massive amount of juice and I don’t think there is a realistic solution to this age old problem on the near-term horizon. Many data centers are aging and require a complete and costly retooling – Enter California Co-Lo(s), a wholly owned subsidiary of California Closets – Obviously I am joking but is this not a catchy idea . At California Co-Lo(s) we have our eye on designing the green data center of tomorrow while incorporating organization, ascetics and a sense of style to accommodate even the most discriminating Metrotechie. Our data centers architects are certified Feng Shui practitioners so not only will your data center be green, economical, organized and stylish but California Co-Lo(s) invokes a sense of peace amidst the drab white backdrop, dull hum of equipment, blinking equipment lights, flickering florescent lighting, arctic temperatures and halon systems that comprise what we call the data center. Reach out an call one of out Co-Lo counselors. Could you imagine – LOL….

Virtualization has definitely reach revolution status.  This is apparent when you take a look at VMware’s stock price and market cap which has eclipsed the market cap of Ford Motor Company.  What makes the fact that VMware’s market cap is greater than that of Ford Motor Co. insane is that only 10% of VMware is publicly traded – The other 90% is owned by EMC and EMC’s shareholders.  OK – obviously I am not a finance guy but somehow the math is not making sense to me, here is how i see it:

• VMware is trading a total pool of ~ 383 million shares at a price of ~ $77 which gives them a market cap of ~ $29.5 billion.
• EMC is trading a total pool of 2.10 billion shares at a price of ~ $19 which gives them a market cap of ~ $40 billion.

• EMC still owns 90% or VMware so that value should be rolled into the EMC maket cap, right?  Obviously, wrong!  If this were the case based on my calculation EMC would have a market cap of ~ $305 billion.
• If 100% of VMware were public would that mean that there would be 3.8 billion shares outstanding and would the market cap be 295 billion?
• Is the stock price inflated because of the limited number of outstanding VMW shares?
• Should EMC be seeing a greater affect from VMware stock price?

Personally I think the VMware stock is way overvalued based on the indicators that surround this stock but like I said I am not a finance guy so I welcome some additional clarification.

I still standby a prediction that I made in the past, I think that VMware continues to suffer from better technology always wins syndrome, the disease that lead to the demise of Netscape.

VMware and wirtualization have created a new marketplace, I contend that server vendors and Microsoft have suffered no financial impact due to the incredible success of VMware. 

While virtulization may have artificially quelled server sprawl, server vendors are now selling more sophisticated equipment like 16 way boxes and blades which removes some of the comoditization from the server market and provides a way for server vendors to infuse margin back into a marker which was headed nowhere – if you are a server vendor this is goodness.

For a while I wondered why Microsoft was not more aggressively attacking VMware, I now think I have a solid hypothesis.  While VMware represents a new market for Microsoft VMware is also creating a OS sprawl problem which is driving increased operating system sales for Microsoft – if you are Microsoft this is goodness.

In the past end users may have had 1 or 2 test and dev environments now that virtualization has made provisioning so simple they are literally creating hundreds of virtual test and dev environments.  To date if you are Microsoft why would you be overly concerned….  It is also important to note that in my estimation many VMware users will reach pre-virtualization physical server counts not long after virtualizing.  This is due in large part to the ease of provisioning and management associated with virtualization, users are provisioning more VMs more frequently – all representing big wins for OS providers (namely Microsoft), application providers, server providers and VMware.

Now onto the technology…  There is no doubt that VMware has a hypervisor that is far superior to Microsoft but Microsoft will eventually catch-up – what happens once Microsoft begins to offer pricing concessions on the Microsoft OS and applications when running in a virtualized environment with the MS hypervisor vs the VMware hypervisor?  To me this sounds reminiscent of the IE vs. Netscape desktop battle – the inferior technology won that battle.  We also watched it happen with Novell, undoubtedly a better NOS then WindowsNT but how many users made the switch?

One final thought, users buy servers and operating systems to run applications that solve business problems.  One of the biggest problems that Novell faced IMO was the fact that it was a file server and not an application platform.  If I am Microsoft I break out the Netscape and Novell play book and go to work.

So I commute into Manhattan just about everyday from New Jersey, other than the fairly standard New Jersey transit delays and over crowded trains most days are fairly uneventful. This morning was not uneventful; I arrived at the station at 6 AM and hopped on the Hoboken express train (I do this often depending on when I get to the station and transfer in Newark to a train bound for NY Penn Station). I got on to the train, secured a decent seat and broke out my laptop – thus far a fairly mundane morning. Completed a few open tasks leftover from the previous day – again a fairly normal morning train ride. Once I completed a few tasks I spent the rest of the time stumbling the internet (I suggest the FireFox plugin), as the train pulled into Newark Penn Station I closed my laptop and reached under my legs to grab my backpack. As I tried to lift the backpack onto the seat it was seemingly tethered to the floor (I know this seems really odd), upon further examination it appears as if one of the dangling straps from the backpack had made its way into a vent slot on the floor of the train. The strap was stuck, really stuck, needless to say I did not have a pair of scissors, pocket knife or my trusty leatherman (just kidding, I don’t carry a leatherman) to cut the strap and release my bag so I was forced to stay on the train, I missed my connection in Newark as I attempted to wrestle my bag from the grasp of New Jersey Transit. After 2 to 3 minutes of tugging, yanking and pulling the bag was free, the strap was completely destroyed as if it had been eaten by the trains ventilation system. I guess the moral of the story here is use the overhead storage, the floor of NJT trains is a dangerous place. Hopefully tonight on the way home I can grab some pictures of the vents and put together a pictorial follow-up post. Not a good start to my day.

Most of you have probably heard of Amanda (Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver) the backup utility, originally developed by the University of Maryland.  Zmanda took the popular Amanda Open Source project and supercharged it, targeting the SMB space as a lower cost alternative to the traditional options; I think they may be onto something.  The Open Source project that really intrigues me is Cleversafe.  The concept is extremely interesting in an era where disaster recovery is in the forefront of every users mind.  I can see a number of applications for Cleversafe, today we have RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks), Sync and Async Remote Mirroring, RAIN (Redundant Array of Independent Nodes) and Cleversafe may be onto what I would call RAIS (Redundant Array of Independent Sites) the ultimate in protection for the geographically dispersed enterprise.  I will keep a close watch on the progress of the Cleversafe project but I would recommend checking out Zmanda and Cleversafe.