Amrit Williams, BigFix CTO continues his conversation 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. I’m back with Vikram Desai, President and CEO of Liquid Computing. Vik, thanks for joining me back again. We were speaking about some of the broader aspects of Liquid Computing and data center automation. I wanted to talk to you about unified computing in general.

Vik, let’s start with the concept of unified computing. What’s the vision for unified computing that Liquid Computing has?

Vikram Desai: Sure. So unified computing by fundamental definition in our opinion has to be able to support open standards. Open standards come in two flavors, if you will. First is on the hardware side, we want to be able to, and a unified computing solution should be able to embrace the commodity elements from any type of server storage and switching provider. We don’t want to have any customer locked in to a particular brand.

So, for example, with our currently available system, LiquidIQ 2.0, we support any type of iSCSI-based standard storage. We have the deepest integration with products from NetApp. We support Standard x86-based servers. Then, from a switching perspective, we have a standards-based Fulcrum 10-Gigabit switching backbone. So each of those are considered best of breed and we’ll continue to expand that hardware compatibility list as we move forward.

But there’s something even more important too. We really don’t have the desire to replace enterprise element management systems or any other systems that already exist in the data center today. So we have morphed down interfaces in to those higher-level systems and we could feed those higher-level systems with all of the automation and sensor information that they are currently lacking. Much, much more granular level information is fed up and as a result those element management systems become much more powerful.

The last part about a standard-based type of unified computing system is that our customers want to make sure that the UCS system doesn’t require the customer to make any types of additive software drivers or proprietary elements that are required in order for a standard operating system or a standard type of application to run. We’ve been able to achieve all of those aspects with the Liquid Computing offering.

Amrit Williams: All of this speaks to enabling an infrastructure that’s dynamic. Actually, Liquid Computing probably has one of the coolest IT tech names around. I think it’s fantastic in terms of how it describes agility and dynamism. Do you think that there is a real ability for organizations to be able to do this dynamic resource allocation that we see some organizations talking about? Do you think there’s going to wide adoption of that? Do you think that that’s a reality in the next couple of years here? Is it valid today?

Vikram Desai: I think it’s an inevitability. In fact, Liquid Computing has existing customers in production that are enjoying those benefits today. It’s those customers that we rely upon, such as Virtuoso to document the types of efficiencies and operational savings that can be derived. Virtuoso has reduced their operating expense by 80% through the implementation of our LiquidIQ solution. They’re able to support both virtualized and Bare Metal environments simultaneously, while enjoying those savings.

Of course, there are other approaches that are complimentary to this. Virtualization as an example is something that’s complimentary to the ability to have a software-controlled physical IT environment. Together, you provide an automated data center. So the capability for an automated data center exists today. We have a series of customers who are already having these systems in production and the benefits have been documented.

Amrit Williams: The interesting aspect of this is that I can’t think of anything more exciting than the ability to spin-up or spin-down resources quickly to address whatever is happening in IT as opposed to those resources, sort of, sitting ideally or ineffectively using them. Many years ago, it would have seemed fantastic, it is become a reality and I think that that’s very exciting for people. What type of things do you think we’re going to see over the next five years in terms of unified computing? What type of advances will we see? I mean, it on one hand seems like a long time, on another it seems like tomorrow. But what type of things do you think we are going to experience; enterprises will start adopting over the next five years?

Vikram Desai: Well, there’s a lot of waste right now that’s associated with standby data center infrastructure, as an example, and there may be more of it in some industries and in financial services, for example, there is some government regulations that require standby data center or data center capabilities to be in different physically geographic areas.

Well, with a fully deployed unified computing system you could actually project an entire data center, inclusive of the applications, all the physical and virtual connections; literally, all the MAC addresses to a disparate physical location within minutes. That type of capability is actually not three or five years away, it’s here right now, but I do see that the adoption of these types of business continuity capabilities will grow very quickly, because think about how much money you can save by having a one to ‘n’ type of disaster recovery or business continuity plan.

Amrit Williams: Oh! It’s fantastic, I mean it’s phenomenal. I was reading an article from Roche Pharmaceuticals and one of the IT guys was mentioning that when they used to have to do clinical trials they would spin up all these machines, so that they could form the algorithms and the other aspects of diagnostics that they need. He said, it takes six months just to get the environment prepped and then once they were done, it would take them six months to bring it all down. He says, he does it all, now, from his iPhone.

He basically just submits the order, the machines come up, they’re done by a third party, they’re hosted, and it’s that capability that, that third party has enabled through some of the technologies that you are communicating right now that are really exciting. I mean, they’re game changing for what generally just to even to put in the infrastructure in place to support the clinical trials, could take a year is literally taking a day or two.

Vikram Desai: That’s exactly it. So what you are describing really at the end of the day is ways in which businesses can generate revenue faster, where they couldn’t generate revenue at all. We have a customer in the oil and gas industry that used to take 45 days to spin up new infrastructure in order to support one of their customers. They can now do it in just a matter of a couple of days with Liquid Computing.

Amrit Williams: Oh, it’s phenomenal, it’s really amazing. Vik, I’d like to make sure that the folks know how to find out more about Liquid Computing. The web address, if you could give that for everybody, I believe it’s liquidcomputing.com.

Vikram Desai: Yeah, that’s exactly it and it doesn’t get any easier than that. We would be certainly happy to answer any questions that folks could have.

Amrit Williams: Vikram Desai, President and CEO of Liquid Computing, that provides a unified computing infrastructure. They have a data center and a chassis blade system, combined with some management software, unified software based management. It’s pretty exciting computing technology; I’d recommend everyone give it a look.

Vik, thank you very much for joining me today.

Vikram Desai: Thank you.

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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