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Strategic Insights for Enterprise Decision Makers
By Enrique Castro-leon, Jackson He, Mark Chang and Parviz Peiravi |
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Available August 2008
It is tempting to think of virtualization as simply a vehicle for server consolidation. However, this is like thinking of an automobile simply as a replacement for the horse-drawn buggy. While the analogy may be appropriate, it oversimplifies what actually happened that allowed an automobile to be built, thus failing to provide the reader with a true understanding of the magnitude of change that took place. To provide a true understanding of how the automobile replaced the buggy, the underlying technologies that were involved need to be identified: mass production with repeatable processes, internal combustion engines using advances in metallurgy to create lightweight alloys, lubrication, electrical and tire technologies, petroleum refining and distribution, and so forth. The convergence of these technologies around the automobile led to an economic transformation that changed the world in the first part of the twentieth century.
The Business Value of Virtual Service-Oriented Grids describes the authors' insights about how the convergence of three well known technologies are defining a new information technology model that will fundamentally change the way we do business. It is not because wonderful new applications will reach the market. That’s only the beginning. These technologies allow the development of applications in a federated fashion using service modules that we call servicelets. The difference is that these federated or composite applications can be built in a fraction of the time it takes to develop traditional, single-vendor applications. This new environment lowers the bar for application development, opening opportunities for thousands of smaller players worldwide.
These three technologies are well known: virtualization, SOA, and grid computing. The fundamental dynamic taking place is that it will become increasingly easier to plan and schedule corporate data from the applications that manipulate the data from the compute engines on which the applications run. In other words, each of these three entities—data, applications, and processing—can be allocated and metered precisely to support any business goal.
The book discusses how each of the technologies mentioned plays a key role in the separation of concerns described above:
- Virtualization decouples applications and the underlying operating system from the hardware platform
- SOA allows separating data from applications
- Grids provide dynamic (on-the-fly) resource management
Together, these three technologies define what we call a virtual service oriented grid environment where servicelets constitute the preferred implementation vehicle.
The speedup in application development and integration will speed up the deployment of IT capabilities, which in turn will have a consequential effect on the organization’s business agility. Decision makers will have increasing capability to select the level of capital and operations expenses that best suits an organization’s business goals. For instance, it is difficult to achieve server load factors beyond the 5 to 15 percent range running applications straight on physical servers. Virtualization acts like a gearbox allowing the piling up of application instances on a physical server and increasing utilization factors to 60 percent and beyond. Hence virtualization lessens the need for preventive over-provisioning and allowing the deferral of equipment purchases.
As you will learn in more detail from reading this book, in this new virtual service oriented grid environment it will be possible to use service level agreements and desired quality of service goals to define the level of infrastructure investment instead of over-provisioning to weather potential peak loads and hoping not to hit power limits in the process. This environment will be characterized by significant ecosystem collaboration that will both reduce the cost of delivering services and uncover new value for customers. The book describes the business trends within which this convergence is taking place and provides insight about how these changes can affect your business. It clearly explains the interplay between technology, architectural considerations, and standards with illustrative examples. Finally, the book tells you how your organization can benefit from servicelets, alerts you about integration pitfalls, and describes approaches for putting together your technology adoption strategy for building your virtual service oriented environment using servicelets.
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"In this book the authors track the trends, create new rules based on new realities, and establish new market models. With virtual service-oriented grids, the sky is the limit!"
- Wei-jen Lee, University of Texas - Arlington, Professor and Director Energy System Research Center.
"This book makes for pleasant reading. It shows the basic concepts and the interplay of three emerging technologies: vitualization, service-orientation and grid computing. However, it does not stop there. It continues on to escort readers to the realm of virtual service-oriented grid solutions -- motivation, key ideas and principles, technical challenges, risks and trade-offs. Finally, this book helps the reader to build a grid strategy aligned with her and his specific business needs and situations. This book moves away from ivory-tower views of the aforementioned technologies, but still laying out a strong vision of virtual service-oriented grid solutions to realize the full potential. I would highly recommend to all of my colleagues; it provides much useful material for an enterprise to make strategic decisions on the convergence of virtualization, SOA and Grids."
- Dr. Jun-Jang (JJ) Jeng, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
"We live in exponential times. Memory is not core-limited to kilobytes but is now semiconductor-limited to megabytes. The Global Economy is thoroughly entrenched. The internet has replaced many of the middle layer of business, has enabled many to work from home or from a small company, and is revolutionizing the retail industries. The advent of SOA is going to impact information processing and computer services on a scale not previously envisioned. It has come just in time for the energy crisis, that is about to become a food crisis, and an economic crisis.
"SOA is arriving just in time for the rebuilding of the energy infrastructure of the electric, gas, and oil networks as well as the conversion of transportation to electric vehicles and to return to train transportation. Just as the power grid is moving to micro-grids and distributed generation, SOA will play a major role in increasing efficiency of all energy networks, the conversion processes between networks, and the use of energy at the customer sites. SOA will be the enabling technology for the smart grid and for the use of renewable distributed generation. SOA will require the easing of political boundaries for more trade and for more information transparency. It is critical for all those involved with the planning process of all supply chains to understand the implications, the hurdles, and the benefits of this next technological breakthrough."
- Gerald Sheblé, Ph.D., MBA, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Portland State University
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Enrique Castro-Leon is an enterprise and data center architect and technology strategist for Intel Digital Enterprise Group working in OS design and architecture, software engineering, high-performance computing, platform definition, and business development. His work involves matching emerging technologies with innovative business models in developed and emerging markets. In this capacity he has served as a consultant for corporations large and small, nonprofits and governmental organizations on issues of technology and data center planning.
He has taken roles as visionary, solution architect, project manager, and has undertaken the technical execution in advanced proof of concept projects with corporate end users and inside Intel illustrating the use of emerging technologies. He has published over 40 articles, conference papers and white papers on technology strategy and management as well as SOA and Web services. He holds PhD and MS degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Purdue University.
Jackson He is a lead architect in Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, specializing in manageability usages and enterprise solutions. He holds PhD and MBA degrees from the University of Hawaii. Jackson has overall 20 years of IT experience and has worked in many disciplines from teaching, to programming, engineering management, datacenter operations, architecture designs, and industry standard definitions. Jackson was Intel’s representative at OASIS, RosettaNet, and Distributed Management Task Force. He also served on the OASIS Technical Advisory Board from 2002–2004. In recent years, Jackson has focused on enterprise infrastructure manageability and platform energy efficiency in dynamic IT environment. His research interest covers broad topics of virtualization, Web services, and distributed computing. Jackson has published over 20 papers at Intel Technology Journal and IEEE Conferences.
Mark Chang is a principal strategist in the Intel Technology Sales group specializing in Service-Oriented Enterprise and advanced client system business and technology strategies worldwide. Mark has more than 20 years of industry experience including software product development, data center modernization and virtualization, unified messaging service deployment, and wireless services management. He participated in several industry standard organizations to define the standards in CIM virtualization models and related Web services protocols. Additionally, Mark has a strong relationship with the system integration and IT outsourcing community. He holds an MS degree from the University of Texas at Austin.
Parviz Peiravi is a principal architect with Intel Corporation responsible for enterprise worldwide solutions and design; he has been with the company for more than 11 years. He is primarily responsible for designing and driving development of service oriented architecture, utility computing, and virtualization solutions and computing architectures in support of Intel's focus areas within enterprise computing.
Parviz is a key contributor to Intel clustering technology based on Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA) and he represented Intel in the Enterprise Grid Alliance (EGA) technical working group. He has designed large scale clusters using Oracle's Real Application Cluster (RAC), Microsoft SQL Server, and IBM DB2, and utility computing infrastructure using grid and virtualization technologies. He has numerous certifications in Enterprise Architecture Framework, SOA, ITIL, XML\Web services, and database design. He is currently researching the application of virtualization, SOA and grids within Predictive Enterprise Infrastructure Framework. Parviz joined Intel in 1997 and holds a BS in Computer and Electrical Engineering from Portland State University.
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