The explosion of the Facebook and its 500 million users was brilliantly examined in the David Fincher movie The Social Network. Compugen hosted a few hundred customers at a North Toronto movie house to screen what people are calling “The Facebook Movie” before its wide release in Canada.
Before the movie started Lou Tetsos, the national director of Compugen’s virtualization business, talked about the explosion of the social network in business. Tetsos said that the tipping point came in late 2009 when there were more virtual servers then physical ones in data centres. “Why is that important,” Tetsos asked the audience? Well it has to do a lot with Intel’s G7 chip set. The 64-bit architecture combined with VMware ESX Version 4 blew away many memory boundaries inside data centres.
According to Tetsos, Compugen customers were experiencing 10 to 1 consolidation in 2008. Today Compugen customers are enjoying a 30 to 1 consolidation because of virtualization. “That’s 60 networks on one host or 900 connections.”
Compugen has built a virtualization practice called VirtualOne that encompasses not just server virtualization but also storage, applications, desktops and networks. Compugen’s approach to virtualization in VirtualOne is a holistic one. VirtualOne may start with servers but it’s an ongoing process of IT optimization that provides cost reduction and better manageability for customers. VirtualOne features a complete lifecycle of plan-design-build-support-refresh services.
David Hudon, VMware’s partner business manager for Canada, said that VirtualOne provides business value as a customer drives toward an optimized date centre where servers, storage, networks and apps are one together. “By doing this you get less is more. Data centres of the future will be built on a common converged architecture,” he said.
Hudon added that virtualization is the best way to selling cloud services. He believes that the market demand for cloud will come from customers who are interested in private clouds, work through a cloud service provider or develop a hybrid cloud. “Cloud is IT-as-a-Service, he said, adding that cloud computing will be viewed as the biggest shift in IT in the last 20 years.
”In 2007 no one had a clue about the cloud, but it has become a No. 1 to 4 priority on most CIO’s lists,” Hudon said. However, virtualization remains the No. 1 priority in 2010 followed by the cloud. Hudon said that customers have many options in the cloud for example Amazon Web Services and, Terremark and its Vcloud Express. Their prices are low. For example, these hosting services charge 3.6 cents per hour. “This offering permits anyone to set up and access a cloud and all you need is a credit card,” Hudon said.
But he recommends working with a solution provider over the credit card route because of security concerns with the public cloud.
“It all comes down to money. How much will it cost and when is the payback. This is the biggest challenge for IT people today. But in the cloud model the more you deploy the less it costs you,” he added.
