Interop Links

Interop in full swing in Vegas; and already both my work e-mail and my personal e-mail are filled with press releases, press-releases disguised as e-mail, and in one odd case, ninja disguised as press-release.

If you’re asking how a ninja can get into my e-mail, you don’t know much about ninjas.  Ninjas can get anywhere.

Still, I figure I might as well check in to see what’s going on at Interop.  For example, Jim Metzler just put out a post on his blog on his Interop first impressions:

I stepped out of the hotel I saw something that I have never seen before in Vegas – there was absolutely no line for a taxi. Every other time I have come to Vegas there has been a long line, often lasting a half hour or more. My fear was that the Interop show would be as empty as the taxi line. It is not. It appears to be down some from last year, but there still is a lot of energy here…

…Then we got to the Q&A and the gap between what is being promoted by vendors and analysts and what is being practiced by IT organizations became painfully clear. For example, vendors and analysts have been talking for years about what IT organizations need to do to meet their internal SLAs. When asked, hardly any of the participants stated that they offer internal SLAs. That did not surprise me. Even more interesting is that vendors and analysts have also been talking for years about the need for visibility into applications. When asked, relatively few of the participants stated that they had that kind of view even though most of them had some kind of APM tool. That did surprise me.

Meanwhile, Network Instruments polled the Interop attendees on virtualization deployment, and released the results via a press release on their website – pessimistic reading if you’re keeping track of virtualization in the enterprise.  Some findings:

• 27 percent identified a lack of visibility and tools as the largest troubleshooting challenge in virtual environments.  Other troubleshooting concerns include a lack of training on virtual infrastructure (26 percent) followed by an inability to secure infrastructure (21 percent).
• 55 percent report experiencing more problems than pluses with virtualization, while 45 percent thought the technology’s benefits outweighed any problems.
• 47 percent report roll-out costs were too high.

That’s not great news for virtualization deployments, and goes to show you that visibility is extremely important in virtual environments in order to keep costs down and make sure you’re going to receive benefits before large deployments.