Some of key take away from Opensource tech day held in Chennai …. 13th March ‘09

In the morning I reached the Chennai Trade Center  around 9 am. Though I lived in Chennai for years but never visited this place. Thanks to open source community for providing me this opportunity.

I have attended the CXO summit in presidency hall of ITC, if I correctly recall the name of the hall. The session exactly started by 10am IST.

The theme of the day was SAAS, cloud computing and virtualization and foss. This is expected normally from any road shows and conferences happening currently.

I got a sense from the panelist that they were more talking on the technologies but  not on how to deliver the Maximum ROI quantum metrics using foss technologies. I think that should have been the key message delivered from the panelist.

First of all to start with, the virtualization technology means different to different players and each one has its pros and cons. As usual like all other technologies.  Each vendor in market crafted differently to differentiate themselves from the rest of the competition.

Dr. Mishra from Novel is more keen on explaining XEN virtualization features and how it competes with the other technology like for example Redhat’s sweet pot KVM and similarly the Amit from Redhat explains about the KVM. All these are good to understand but how as a manager I need to take a decision on which virtualization technology to adopt.

As Mishra pointed out that, currently there are two virtualization technology vendor  are enterprise ready and one is commercially available and is there for quite some time is VMWare. As of now VMWare is the market leader and XEN is the industry ready from Novel perspective which is open source.

There are lots of discussions on the Openvz ( openviz.org ) model of virtualization, which is more native to unix and exploits the unix features. It has a small memory and performance foot print. However this is not industry ready yet as it does not provide all the tenets of enterprise grade virtualization tools. Also one of the key important parameter to be considered as the performance can be different in different virtualization technologies. In case of full virtualization, the performance foot print will to high compared to a para virtualization model.   

What I got at the end as Amit pointed out is in today’s context the Hypervisor is anyway free and is available for without any cost. So it makes more sense for the IT managers to think louder and introspect the right Management tools for virtualization which is the key.

I will continue with some more articles on these technologies as these are the four key pillars of innovation and there is lot of attentions paid. I prefer to add one more technology to watch is SOA and how it is unfolding in coming days.