The Virtual Data Center

I’m back from RSA and SAP; it was a great week, and boy is my brain tired. But despite the lack of super-compelling new technologies at RSA this year, there was one interesting point I brought home. The company I work for usually has a booth at the shows that I attend. I spend my days at the shows in analyst and customer meetings and walking the floor during breaks looking at other technologies. It’s a good time, albeit an exhausting one that starts very early for breakfast and usually extends each night into the wee hours of the morning with customers and partners…but I can’t complain.
Anyway, back to a day in the life of Alan’s conference-going adventures!  Throughout the day I will make my way back to our booth to check in, see how things are going, and pick up a stack of business cards that have been left by others with my name on them (we all know these shows are about meeting people as much as scouting tech ;). I drop the stack of the hour in my pocket and repeat this process a few times each day. Then I go through them, catalog and sort them by technology and responsibility back in the hotel room that evening, creating a clean slate for the business card exchange round the next day. I always come out of these shows with cool companies and meet great people through this process.

This past week there was one huge trend in my card stacks that I wasn’t expecting, especially at a security show: they were almost all associated with management. Management can be broken down into sub-categories, like log harvesting and analysis, outbound document management, virtual firewall management, complete data center management, etc. But all of my cards this year trended towards awareness vs. remediation and mitigation, as has been the trend in the past. I’ve long said that the #1 barrier to virtualization adoption in the data center will be management of these disparate virtualization technologies, and if RSA’s security trend is any indication, we may very well be on our way to climbing the management mountain. I was both surprised and extremely pleased to see these technologies as the face of RSA ‘08.  Granted I’m sure most of these solutions were drawn from compliance necessity vs. addressing the core management of the virtual data center world, but I’ll definitely take what I can get.  Remember, it’s all about baby steps and making due with what we have today in order to advance a step forward towards tomorrow.

If management of the virtual data center is near, does that mean that we’ll be able to focus all of our time on software switching in the hypervisor? Is it my birthday?