Amrit Williams, BigFix CTO speaks with Vikram Desai, president and CEO of Liquid Computing on optimizing virtual and bare metal computing to optimize service provision to end users.

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Amrit Williams: Welcome, this is Amrit Williams, your host on Beyond the Perimeter. And today, I’m joined by the Vikram Desai, President and CEO of Liquid Computing; Vik, thank you for joining me today.

Vikram Desai: My pleasure, Amrit, and thank you for having me down on board.

Amrit Williams: So Liquid Computing, as you guys stated, provides unified computing infrastructure for dynamic data centers, you guys offer what’s called a data center in a chassis, a blade system. You guys seem to have married some of the necessary requirements for data center in a fairly tightly integrated package, but I’d like to start with, if you could just give me a high-level overview, what does Liquid Computing do, what problems are you guys solving, what benefits do you guys offer to the enterprise?

Vikram Desai: Well, that’s a good question and one of the interesting facts out there today is that many vendors who are in pursuit of providing an automated data center and why? Well, because it’s important that the overall cost of operating a data center come down. The specific area that Liquid Computing focuses on is the provision of software control of underlying IT, physical IT assets. So servers, switches, and storage that are relied upon by both bare metal and virtualized operating systems.

Amrit Williams: Have you found the — I ma sure virtualization is having a pretty big impact on your business. When you guys were founded, were you aiming at the virtual market itself? Virtual management infrastructure, any of that or when you were coming in, I suppose I know that Liquid Computing was founded in 2003, the original design wasn’t necessarily being driven by virtualization.

Vikram Desai: Our original design was always focused on data center fabrics. So providing automation and control across the traditional three silos of server switching and storage and what we’ve seen over time is that virtualization has been integrated within each of these silos, but there hasn’t been any type of action to provide automation across the silos. Actually, remove the silo walls so that you can deliver greater efficiencies. So when you take a look at the solution that Liquid Computing provides, we really are insensitive to whether it’s a virtualized environment or a bare metal environment that the automation of the underlying IT physical resources provides the same benefits at either of them.

Amrit Williams: Now, understanding, of course, that virtualization breaks down. Sometimes unnaturally for many organizations, the silos that you talked about, the walls between the silos, it’s very common for networking and switching people to worry about their fabric from their perspective using their tools. They tend to be kind of antagonistic and not very supportive of the application teams or the OS, management, and operations guys, but virtualization breaks all that down.

I mean, you basically have several different processes that are converged into possibly a single device that could be communication between a web server and the database server going through and communicating, again, on the device and it changes the dynamic for organizations.

Have you found that the organizations are finding it easier to facilitate communication because of this, are they struggling with lack of language consistency between the groups?

Vikram Desai: It’s really exacerbated what was already a bad problem in to something that’s dramatically worse and that’s really not just our opinion we’re seeing the same type of information reflected in polls by third party, for example, 00:03:18 Morgan recently provided survey results that indicated that the coordination of server switching and storage configuration whether virtualized or bare metal is one of the biggest problems that data centers are facing today.

Then if you layer on top of that the fact that while virtualization itself provides many benefits in terms of efficiencies, it’s not something that could provide an answer across the board. There are many multitude applications or high performance related database applications that just aren’t suited towards virtualization. They even require more horsepower. They lose the processing efficiencies when they’re virtualized.

So, as a result, current IDC studies I believe have stated that there’s only about 15% to 20% of all data center applications that have been virtualized, today, and by far and away the remainder are still bare metal. That’s not to say over a period of the next three to five years that will become much more balanced, but what I am saying is that there will always be some balance between the two that are required and really predicated by what the application requirements are and what the end user needs are.

Amrit Williams: Do you find that the needs of the administrators themselves shift when they move from bare metal to virtualization in terms of the tools they’re using?

Vikram Desai: Yeah. So if you consider a breakdown of the data center that has both of these technologies or approaches employed and I am going to be very, very generic. At the very bottom, you have your physical IT assets; above that, you’ll have either bare metal, a virtualized environment; and above that, there’ll be the applications; and finally, the element management system that spans across everything, but stops short of being able to manage command and control, the underlying IT physical infrastructure.

So whether it’s virtualized environments or bare metal environments they have a pretty handle on how it is they can motion applications from one space to anther provided those two spaces exist, how they could in a bare metal environment add clusters. But in each of them, they really don’t have a handle at all on how they can — in advance of a motioning of resources over, have the physical assets ready to be motioned to, short of overbuying and having one to end type of capability available for applications just in case they’re needed.

And boy! Right in that area is a tremendous area of waste, if you will; why have assets just sitting there, just in case when they don’t need to be sitting there. And that’s one of the fundamental things that data center administrators struggle with.

Amrit Williams: This is obviously, one of the inherent capabilities that Liquid Computing provides.

Vikram Desai: It is and above and beyond that, there’s a vision for unified computing that we have as a company and it’s related to what we characterize as being an open architecture solution.

Data centers really don’t want to be locked in to any particular brand or label, if you will. They traditionally want to have multiple vendors. They want to be able to choose the best of breed based upon what the application’s needs are. And, we provide that type of offering. So we make sure that we are able to support multiple vendors and we’ll continue to expand that list of calling a hardware compatibility list as we move forward over time.

So our customers can always know if they’re looking for unified computing solutions and then they want to drive the types of cost savings which we found to be incidentally 80% or more is documented by our customers, then they can do so with us and not have to worry about being locked in to a particular brand.

Amrit Williams: As someone who spends a lot of time talking to the folks in the enterprise it’s critically important to this concept of lock in. I don’t think most people appreciate how much time spent by enterprises ensuring that they’re not locked in to a specific solution. This concept of openness, unification, and integration are terribly important to a lot of these, especially large enterprises, as they see these dynamics and the IT organizations shift and evolve.

Vik, I do appreciate you spending time with us. We want to bring you back for the second segment here. So, thank you very much for Vik and Liquid Computing. We’ll be back soon.

Announcer: You have just listened to Beyond the Perimeter, sponsored by BigFix Inc. Views expressed on this Podcast are the personal opinions of Podcast participants and do not reflect official positions of their employers or BigFix.

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