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.

Just finished reading Mark Lewis’ latest blog in which Mark talks about the evolution of Fibre Channel to FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet).  I have to agree that the convergence at the network layer will continue and the maturity and pervasiveness of Ethernet will surely prevail over FC (fibre channel).  Interestingly enough HyperSCSI or SCSI-over-Ethernet did not prevail over iSCSI.  This could be due to the fact that there was a FC alternative.  I have a theory that with the exception of the largest of shops most organizations are looking to converge and consolidate network infrastructure.  Most of these shops are looking to leverage functionally available in Layer 3 and Layer 4, while there is a obvious performance benefit of a direct storage connection at Layer 2 for many shops this does not outweigh their familiarity and comfort with the functionality provided at Layer 3 and 4.  For example, IPsec or OSPF – The Fibre Channel community has developed equivalents to some of the functionality that we see in the IP world, for example OSPF in the  Fibre Channel world is FSPF (Fabric Shortest Path First).  The big question in my mind is do we continue to build develop functionality at the transport and network layer or does the storage industry focus on the transport layer (Layer 4) and let the networking industry focus on the network layer (Layer 3), data link layer (Layer 2) and the physical layer (Layer 1) seems to make more sense to me from a long term perspective.  Not sure why the storage industry should be reinventing OSPF, RIP, EIGRP, IPsec, etc…but that is just my opinion – but based on the recent adoption rate of iSCSI I think it might be the opinion of others as well.

As you may or may not know Google continued is acqusition rampage and recently acquired FeedBurner.  I don’t ususally check my FeedBurner stats but after finding out about the Google acqusition and the fact that Google made all of the FeedBurner Pro Stats availabe for free as they do with most of their acqusitions, I wanted to make sure I was taking advantage of the pro fetures and in fact they were now availble to me but I need to activate them.  While logged in I noticed that gotITsolutions.org traffic is trending nicely.  Thank you for visiting and I hope that you are all finding the content worthwhile.

What an incredible web based philanthropic movement. This is an incredible way to share your good fortune with someone who needs a little help jump starting their life.

This may not be the most appropriate post or mobile application but it is a problem that many of us who live, travel and work in the New York City area struggle with almost daily.  Many days I find my self headed for the 2 or 3 train from downtown to mid-town and it would be really nice to relieve myself before the 15 minute subway ride.  Well if you spend much time in NYC you know this can be a challenge, even if you are lucky enough to locate a restroom there is a high probability that the door is probably locked.  Well the problem is being solved by Yojo Mobile and an application called MiZPee.