InovaWave's CTO, Dave McCrory, joined in the Ziff Davis IT Link online social networking discussion centered around virtualization. In this session, he and Mike Vizard had a great conversation that started off talking about InovaWave, its products and virtualization performance in general. After that, the conversation was about anything virtualization. The following information is from that chat session. Be sure to check out other great sessions within this Ziff Davis IT Link community.
Mike Vizard: Hello, welcome to the session.
Inovawave: Thanks.
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Mike Vizard: I don't think most people know much about InovaWare so why don't you tell folks what it is that you do?
Inovawave: InovaWave is a virtualization optimization company. We allow enterprises to get greater consolidation and better performance out of their virtualized environments.
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Mike Vizard: Why is that a problem? Are there performance issues associated with virtualization?
Inovawave: Virtualization performance is a problem today. Most people realize after the fact that there is a great strain that is put on the Disk I/O subsystem and memory is usually consumed to 100% to help make up for this fact. Few if any enterprises put databases in virtual machines, for example.
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Mike Vizard: How do you go about fixing that?
Inovawave: We create Virtual I/O Channels (VIOCs) which allows Virtual Machines to concurrently do reads and writes. This is done by predicting what read and write requests will be before they are made.
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Mike Vizard: Sounds a little like branch prediction in a processor. Why can't the people that build virtual machines put this capability in their products in the first place?
Inovawave: There is a lot more taking place behind the scenes. Predicting information that will be requested in the future is quite difficult. There has been over 9 years of R&D that we have put into this technology. The virtualization vendors are focused on virtualization not I/O optimization.
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Mike Vizard: Do you think that performance issues are slowing the adoption of virtualization?
Inovawave: Absolutely it is. No one can consolidate or virtualize an entire enterprise application due to concurrency and performance limits.
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Mike Vizard: How hard is it to set up your software?
Inovawave: The DXtreme product can be installed in under 30 minutes and the only adjustments that need to be made are to the memory allocated to the VMs. It is only installed on the host, nothing inside of the VMs/Images.
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Mike Vizard: And what does that cost in a typical scenario?
Inovawave: Typical pricing for our Enterprise product is $3,500 per physical CPU socket (unlimited cores per socket).
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Mike Vizard: It seems to me at least the people are relying on clustering software to try virtualize their databases and using VMware for file servers. With your software can you skip the need for the clustering software?
Inovawave: That is certainly an option, a combination of say VMware's VMotion for the High Availability/Disaster Recovery and our software for performance would provide equivalent or better performance and be far less complex to implement and manage.
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Mike Vizard: Have you struck up any alliances with the VM vendors, or the database vendors, or the server vendors?
Inovawave: We have partnerships with both VMware and Microsoft. We are in VMware's Community Source and Technical Alliance Partner Programs and we are in Microsoft's ISV, Virtual Server Redistribution, and VHD Programs. We are exploring the possibility of database and server vendors, but haven't signed any agreements yet.
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Mike Vizard: How do you think virtualization will ultimately change the way people think about systems management?
Inovawave: I think it will dramatically change systems management. The systems management paradigm is built around the assumption that the physical infrastructure is the only infrastructure. This is an assumption that will fundamentally change and will cause a shift into management of physical environments and virtual environments, while attempting to map virtual machines to physical hosts. This is a very complex management scenario, which is why people are struggling with managing very large virtualized environments today.
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Mike Vizard: Do we need a new class of systems management tools in order to deal with this?
Inovawave: I believe so. We need a class of systems management tools that are designed for environments that are transient (constantly disappearing and reappearing without notice). They also need to account for changes in which host they reside on, etc. This abstraction needs to be accounted for by some different type of systems management tool than what exists today.
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Mike Vizard: Do you think that will be done by existing companies in that space or will it require a new kind of company?
Inovawave: I think the most likely scenario will be a few startup companies will find the right paradigm, develop the tools to a point and then be acquired by the existing companies to fill their needs for a solution.
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Mike Vizard: How do you think virtualization will change the way people think about application development? Will we see need types of highly distributed applications?
Inovawave: I think it will. I think that the need for highly distributed applications will appear and I think that there will be performance issues around this that will require solutions like ours. I also think that application development environments will have to account for virtualization and will begin to be crafted to customized operating system environments for VMs. Again, this will bring new and different performance challenges to VM systems.
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Mike Vizard: How long will it take for all this to play out?
Inovawave: I think it will be 2 or 3 years before this emerges as a broad problem. There will then be another 1 to 2 years before decent solution comes along.
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Mike Vizard: How will virtualization change the way vendors need to think about software licenses?
Inovawave: I think the only way to solve the software license problem will be based on either per user or per virtual machine basis. Because of the appearance and dissapearance problems that I spoke about earlier. Some companies like Microsoft are already adjusting their licensing to support virtualization. Windows 2003 and SQL Server are good examples.
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Mike Vizard: This is all we have time for today. Thanks for sharing your insights and thoughts. Best of Luck!
Inovawave: Thank You Very Much.
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