2010 Prediction: Marek Piekarski, VirtenSys

By Marek Piekarski
published: Sunday, December 27 2009

I/O Virtualization - Mainstream Technology in 2010

For much of the last decade, enterprise servers have been stuck in a time warp, a nice cozy backwater where the server vendors have been protected from the vagaries of economic storms by Moore’s Law and the ubiquity of PC hardware. The internet has become a utility, businesses have adapted, and several booms have busted, but the commodity server is still a fast PC.

2009 has been the beginning of the end. The economic downturn, the rise of “green” issues, and the maturing of server virtualization have created a “perfect storm,” which will force server architectures out of their quiet pools and into the swirling waters of competition and innovation.

In some ways, there will be (as ever) some looking back to how things were. Most of the problems today are not new. The older generation will remember and remark that “we solved that problem in mainframes before you were out of diapers.”

But some things have changed.

Servers – or more precisely the application which run on them – are not just the tools of a business. They are the business. If the servers stop, the business stops. And if it stops for too long, like a shark, it dies.

Servers are not just critical, they are also ubiquitous. No part of a business is not dependant on some data center hosted application or service.

Also, the rate at which businesses evolve has accelerated. How they operate today has little in common with how they operated a few years back. How will they operate in a few years time? All we can say is that “the past is no predictor of the future.” Businesses that want to survive and prosper will have to be adaptable and deploy an agile IT infrastructure, which can rapidly adapt to business needs.

2010 will see a long awaited change to the architecture of the server: the introduction of I/O virtualization in today’s data centers and the evolution of the commodity server into a truly efficient and agile application platform. I/O virtualization enables the complete decoupling of the application execution resources of the server (CPUs and memory) from the physical I/O resources, determining determine its connectivity and bandwidth to other servers, storage and clients. It creates independent pools of resources from which virtual application platforms can be dynamically built, with whatever processing, I/O bandwidth and connectivity the application demands. It allows components of that server to be independently upgraded as technology improves with minimal disruption.

Below are some Q&As that users may use as a quick reference when researching I/O virtualization and its benefits:

• Want to introduce 10 Gb Ethernet, but the cost is too high? Not sure about FCoE? I/O virtualization lets you introduce any new I/O technology without replacing your servers or disrupting your existing networking or storage infrastructure.
• Need to provide your servers with more I/O bandwidth as you deploy more server virtualization? I/O virtualization provides a mechanism to “right-size” your I/O for any server workload.
• Want to add more compute capacity, but don’t need more expensive networking and storage? I/O virtualization allows you to add low-cost I/O-less servers, which can just share the existing networking and storage resources.
• Need to get more value from your capex? Need to extend the life-expectancy of your data center? I/O virtualization improves the utilization of your server and infrastructure resources by minimizing the dependencies between physical server components.

But why 2010? I/O virtualization has been around for many years.

Changes occur when motive, means and opportunity come together. The accelerating pace of business and the pressures of the economic recession have provided the motivation for companies to innovate and compete. At the same time, the standard PC I/O interconnect – PCI – has evolved to the point where it can deliver a virtualization technology based on low-cost commodity components. And finally, the mainstream acceptance of server virtualization has changed the end-users mindset from “Why would I want this?” to “When can I have this?” and they want it right away.

2010 will see an increasing deployment of I/O virtualization products, not just in specific niche markets, but in the broad, horizontal sense of “what is the best way of building a cost-effective, manageable, reliable and future-proof data center?” I/O virtualization will, just like server and storage virtualization, become a mainstream data center technology that will literally change the shape of servers to come.

Courtesy of the “perfect storm,” it certainly will be an interesting year.