Q&A: Citrix's CTO on why the cloud needs virtualisation

gallery

Virtualisation firms like to hitch their fates to the rising star of cloud computing, claiming their tech is vital to make the cloudy revolution happen.

Speaking to IT PRO this week at a press event in Budapest, Citrix chief technology officer for data centres Simon Crosby makes the case for virtualisation as a cloud enabler - and explains why Microsoft's licensing hold-up isn't actually the tech giant's fault.

Crosby also predicts cloud pricing can fall further still, and explains why VMware is causing concern for the channel.

Virtualisation is frequently cited as the tech that makes – or will make – the cloud work. Why is it important to the cloud landscape, and is it equally important to Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)?

Cloud is several things. It’s software as a service, it’s platform as a service, it’s infrastructure as a service, at the crudest level...

In infrastructure as a service, virtualisation is the enabler because in infrastructure as a service you’re basically renting computer storage by the hour and then virtualisation allows you to just add your workload whenever you want to run it. So that’s a key requirement. It also then feeds up into the platform at a service level, because if you look at how Microsoft is building Azure, what VMware will do with SpringSource, and where all the other platform players are going, they will use virtualisation underneath as the way of dynamically scaling out units of compute.

So I’ll write my next application on a platform which is not aware of the boundaries or confines of a single server. It assumes availability and scalability, elasticity, properties. And under the hood, this application platform is dynamically instantiating new units of compute by throwing up VMs [virtual machines] as and when I need them. Platform as a service is also founded on the notion of a virtualisation layer. In the traditional SaaS area, even if you look at Salesforce and the traditional big SaaS apps – eBay and so on – they’re not substantially virtualised today.

Virtualisation is starting to penetrate those folks in the same way that it’s penetrating large enterprises. If you look at someone like a Yahoo, it is merely a large enterprise, with several hundred thousand servers. It has all the same challenges of legacy software, of low utilisation and having lots and lots of apps... And its requirements are very similar to what a large enterprise would want. It wants to quickly instantiate a new app, a new property under management or whatever it might happen to be, and dynamically put infrastructure to use for apps and allow it to scale.

Its requirements are very similar to those of large enterprises who want to build private clouds. So funnily enough if you talk to the Yahoo guys they’ll tell you they’re building a private cloud even though the company is a big SaaS vendor.

So there virtualisation has an increasing role to play, but it hasn’t very significantly penetrated them yet, because typically they run one instance per server.

Email to a friend

Print this page