• The generalities I posted a few years ago still apply (and, I think, are a good read in any case about the realities of analyst coverage).
• The updates a year and a half ago are still very accurate, although I might name different specific clients today.
• The partial client list from half a year ago is still pretty accurate, although Microsoft and Kognitio have dropped off, Clearpace changed its name to RainStor, and non-RDBMS analytic data management/analysis contenders Cloudera and Splunk have been added.
• While I have user clients, I have nothing to disclose about them.

One new development is that for the first time since 2001, I’ve taken stock in a private company. It’s Petascan, a seed/stealth-stage outfit with some very innovative ideas about how to use Flash memory in support of analytic data processing.  I’d like to do more of this, with conflicts evaluated on a case-by-case basis.  For example, I bet I could bring a lot of value to vertically-oriented analytics start-ups, who would at worst compete with only a small fraction each of the business of the more horizontally-oriented companies I generally write about.

• Crossbeam has two main hardware platforms – the high-end X-series and the midrange C-series. The X-series is the one with the architecture I previously praised, and about which Paul himself is “really excited.” The less remarkable C-series, however, is the one Check Point’s UTM-1 products are actually based on.
• There are three UTM-1 models. Two of them use hardware that exactly duplicates Crossbeam’s C2 and C6. The most powerful of the three – the 2050 – is based on a modified C6 design. Paul isn’t 100% sure in his recollection of what the modification was, but thinks it’s probably extra RAM.
• The hardware is actually manufactured by an unnamed Asian outfit. Crossbeam currently buys the boxes and resells them to Check Point. It is anticipated that this will change over time, and Check Point will take care of procuring its own boxes (from the same manufacturer). At least, that’s the plan if the Check Point and Crossbeam hardware specs significantly diverge.
• The Crossbeam C-Series — and hence also the new Check Point UTM-1 – are indeed classic Type 1 appliances. The biggest difference vs. generic Dell/HP/whatever servers is the density of Ethernet ports (4-8 per box, depending on model). In particular, Check Point is very proud of the work it’s done optimizing for Intel processors.*
• Notwithstanding anything above, the UTM-1 machines really are Check Point appliances. Check Point does 100% of the support, it has some administrative software pieces that are different from Crossbeam’s, etc.

*Indeed, as the focus of security processing shifts more and more to the application layer, they contend security processing is more and more like any other kind – rather than, say, low-level network processing.

What seems to be going on here is that Check Point is cannibalizing Crossbeam’s C-Series business, and Crossbeam is being gracious about giving it up while focusing on the much more differentiated and strategic X-Series. Crossbeam self-identifies as a high-end player anyway, so this all makes perfect sense. The real issue for Crossbeam going forward has little to do with whether it can squeeze a few more commodity dollars out of the midrange. Rather, it’s whether Crossbeam can hold its technical lead when the large server manufacturers finally figure out the need to create virtualization-friendly, networking-friendly, blade-based systems. The key point here is “networking-friendly”; many servers just need more data movement capability than conventional systems now provide.

Or to put it another way: The computer is a network.

But to me, the really interesting future here is PCs with removable persistent solid-state storage. I wrote about the subject a year ago, and I just want to take this opportunity to remind people that’s it’s a desirable and not-implausible way for personal computing and consumer electronics to evolve. If the storage part of the system can be separated out, what you’re left with is mainly the human-facing I/O and the processing power to drive that. So from where I sit, portable external storage could drive an explosion in interesting and useful electronic device form factors.

• VMware quotes a figure of 20,000 enterprise customers, if you count everybody who is at least testing the software and so on; i.e., it’s a somewhat inflated figure. Still, the “real” number is surely big.
• They claim ¼ of those have a “VMware first” policy, to deploy new apps on a virtual rather than dedicated machine. That’s impressive until you realize enterprise try to roll their own apps as rarely as possible these days.
• They suggest VMware is extremely helpful at times you’d like to have two copies of the same platform – e.g., for development, or when you have to take the system down for brief maintenance. It’s hard to argue with that claim.
• We didn’t have the time to talk about my performance concerns.

As for how this all plays with appliances and SaaS – that’s largely a future, but potentially a very interesting one. Here’s what I mean.

In July, 2005, VMware starting pushing the concept of “virtual appliance” with 6 ISVs, mainly large software vendors who wanted to make their software easy to deploy for evaluation cycles. By November, 2006 they’d rolled out a “marketplace” with 380 ISVs, although many of those seem to be single individuals offering software for free. Microsoft, Cisco and so on have rival announcements of partnerships and so on, but I haven’t ascertained whether these get past the Barney level (“I love you, you love me” without real substance).

Basically, a virtual appliance is a bundled software stack (e.g., DBMS plus OS), with more or less the same ease-of-deployment advantages boasted by regular appliances (assuming, of course, that you’ve deployed virtualization in the first place). However, virtual appliances lack the other big advantage of regular appliances – specialized hardware. Right now, they do not support the networking cards, encryption chips, and so forth that many appliance vendors use. What’s more, as I noted previously, I don’t see how they could be as well tuned in their hardware/software combinations as real appliances are. VMware has APIs and a “community source” program to encourage one-off extensions to support special hardware, but mainly this is an area where future innovation will be needed. As to when that innovation will come, and whether it will come primarily from the hardware or the virtualization side — well, that remains to be seen. But if I wanted to grow market share or start a new venture on the hardware side today, I’d be looking to generic appliance support (with a strong blade orientation, of course) as the way to make my mark.

And here’s something that very few people seem to have thought about so far – virtual SaaS. As with appliances, SaaS has as one of it major selling points ease of deployment. What’s more, another of its big virtues – rapid update cycle – requires super-easy deployment as well. Traditionally, this is done on a hosted basis. But there’s actually no reason the same benefits couldn’t be provided using virtual appliance technology. So if issues of data privacy or control or whatever are barriers to the adoption of SaaS applications – well, they won’t always have to be. Conversely, if traditional packaged software vendors want to co-opt SaaS’s benefits, they should be perfectly able to, performance-overhead-cost issues perhaps aside.

EDIT: The specific VMware gentleman I spoke with was

• Srinivas Krishnamurti
• Director, Product Management and Market Development

]]> http://www.monashreport.com/2007/01/03/virtual-appliances-saas/feed/ 4 http://www.monashreport.com/2006/07/28/would-a-google-pc-succeed/ http://www.monashreport.com/2006/07/28/would-a-google-pc-succeed/#comments Fri, 28 Jul 2006 09:31:26 +0000 Curt Monash http://www.monashreport.com/2006/07/28/would-a-google-pc-succeed/ Richard Brandt asked me to look over his post on the oft-rumored possibility of a Google PC. I actually opined on this back in January, when the rumors were rife in connection with a supposed Wal-Mart sales/marketing agreement. I concluded that that would make a lot of sense for internet connectivity and student/homework uses (I didn’t consider work-at-home or gaming uses because that didn’t seem a good fit with Wal-Mart). The reasoning I came up with back then looks good in retrospect, with only minor tweaks (e.g., my new reason for not worrying about IE-only websites is the IE emulation capability in Firefox).

Richard, however, goes further, thinking that Google could succeed in PCs used mainly to run word processing, spreadsheets, etc.. His arguments include:

• Google has a well-regarded brand name. Check.
• Google might be able to make them cheaply, and even if they couldn’t, they could contract out the manufacture. Check.
• Google wouldn’t be burdened with Microsoft bloatware, and hence could make really cheap PCs. Hmm. There’s some truth to that, although it also is the case that some of that bloat provides actual functionality. And there might be more actual functionality in the future – e.g., speech recognition.
• Google is great at UIs, and could fix UIs like desktop Linux’s. Umm, I’m not sure Google is particularly great at UIs. But anybody with a decent usability lab should be able to turn out something that is, well, usable. Besides, if you ask my fellow posters on Slashdot, there isn’t anything wrong with Linux’s UI anyway.
• Their SaaS nature gives Google’s apps a big leg up on Microsoft Office. Hmm. First of all, to the extent you keep data on Google servers, you have to worry about Big Brother. The way things are going, that’s not a concern to dismiss lightly, no matter what your home country may be. That potentially major detail aside, SaaS is goodness. But it would take some pretty clever marketing to convince consumers it was an actual advantage. What’s more, the most obvious area of advantage – collaboration – is one that will also immediately bring privacy concerns to the fore. Assuming consumers actually care about privacy, of course …

As for Google’s ability to execute – well, they’re doing a very mixed job with the Google search appliance. At the high end of the market, it’s a joke, in terms of functionality and marketing alike. But in Microsoft-like manner, it’s eating into the low end due to its price and the company’s reputation.

So I’m not sure where I come down on this, except to ask – is the PC even the right device to think about? Or would a mobile device – video/music player, etc. – make more sense?

None of this means that you need to run tons of stovepiped OLTP database applications, each on their respective legacy platforms. Physically consolidating those is a great idea (although in lieu of logical consolidation, loose coupling via SOA, et al. may be much more effective — which is kind of the whole point of DBMS2). But it gives pause as to whether a wholly virtualized environment will be “the” computing platform of the future — or at least as to how soon that future will arrive.

Of course, that kind of market research study is not to be taken seriously, at least in its detailed dates and numbers. But of interest is the #1 benefit to flash drives cited in a survey they did, because it’s one I hadn’t focused on before — lower power consumption.

What I’ve been talking about is a grand change in personal computing, with removable flash drives replacing hard drives, and being carried from device to device. Laptops with fixed flash drives may be a key step on the path toward that future.

1. Vendors have economies of scale making general-purpose computers.
2. Users have economies of scale running homogenous, general-purpose computers.
3. Virtualization will work.

But when one thinks a little bit about what’s really driving the use of appliances, those arguments fall apart.

Throughout the history of commercial computing, special purpose data center devices have succeeded in two areas — communications, and high-volume storage — for three main reasons:

1. These uses involve moving lots of data, at high speeds. Unnecessary overhead hurts.
2. These uses are generally simple and repetitive. Much of the overhead of flexible, general-purpose computing is unnecessary.
3. For internet devices only, most especially ones that do security.) Single-purpose devices are much easier to lock down.

Since the mid-1990s, communication/networking has been exploding as a fraction of overall computing — and therefore, the same has been true of appliances.

If you don’t think this trend will continue, then probably either:

• You think Layer 7 inspection will reverse it, because a device that can do Layer 7 inspection needs to be able to run general-purpose apps.
• You think virtualization will reverse it, because virtualization lets hardware be optimized for multiple kinds of uses at once.

But I think both of those opinions would be wildly overstated.

A good illustration of these points may be found in an exchange I had with Stuart Frost, CEO of DATallegro. DATallegro is a data warehouse appliance maker heavily optimized for streaming data on and off disk, moving it between mulitiple processors, and making the best use of onboard cache, memory bus, etc. Stuart thinks it’s likely that he could get much of the same benefit from shipping on a known configuration of name-brand equipment. But I can’t imagine any way that DATallegro’s software would work well on any kind of virtualized multi-purpose grid kind of setup. Blech. The vast majority of their engineering would be simply wasted.

Nor will Cisco routers be replaced by software running on Sun grids any time soon.

1. There’s no reason Intel shouldn’t be able to leapfrog AMD. Permanent loss of market leads tends to be due to factors such as platform shifts or incurable code bloat; none of those seem to be present in the case of microprocessors.

2. For a while, I’ve been dealing with software and appliance vendors that like Intel because they’re paid to like Intel, via various kinds of marketing arrangements. But over the last few months, the liking has begun to sound a lot more sincere.

Disclosure: Intel is a co-sponsor of two of my white papers. Wiseasses might suggest that my point #2 above is therefore actually somewhat recursive in its reasoning.

Can these views be reconciled? I think so. The answer, simply, is that Flash drives need embedded RFID chips (or some substitute technology) so that their movements can be detected and controlled.

“But wait!”, you cry. “Doesn’t that mean anybody who legitimately carries a secure Flash drive around can have her movements nefariously tracked?” Well yes, it does, but that genie is out of the bottle anyway. We just have to deal with it on another level.

Technorati Tags: Flash, security, privacy, RFID