Could Virtual Appliances be the iTunes of Enterprise Services?
November 12th, 2006 by Lou
A virtual appliance is a network service that is preconfigured and prepackaged to do useful work.
We don’t buy dryer parts to construct a dryer, and we shouldn’t be constructing, in most cases, many components of our business systems. The only reason this practice persists is the nature of the business of buying and selling useful service components that involves the competing interests of hardware, operating system and software vendors. Customers have traditionally only had the option of either buying pieces of a solution and constructing it, or buying or using a service managed elsewhere, like SalesForce.com or Google Docs and Spreadsheets and JotDot.
But the success of VMware has exposed another approach that may change market forces. The ability to buy and install prepackaged stacks that include the operating system components and application components that do useful work is possible and practical with VMware. The value proposition of this is independent of VMware itself, but its more difficult to perform this sort of operation with a raw piece of hardware and a CD or ISO image. There are too many variables. It’s possible this same preconfigured service stack is what Oracle will attempt by branding it’s own Linux support.
The complexity of interactions between operating system and application configurations drives a proliferation of underutilized hosts, or complex hosts with a fragile mix of applications and services. Neither of these alternatives is desirable. Dealing with these issues is expensive, difficult and complicated. Underutilization is costly, and overly complex machines with many services on a single host are difficult to manage.
But the impediments to the virtual appliance approach are akin to the problems Apple faced with launching iTunes. These problems aren’t technical. They are business issues and risks. Suppose someone were to build a service appliance for content management that could be installed as a VMware instance. It could include the operating system, the application server and the database server, ready to go. The impediments and risks presented by Grady are important, but not the real problem. How would you deal with the business issues presented by supporting the varied underlying commercial components?
The typical licensing and support arrangements that exist now between software, operating system and hardware vendors will not suffice. The OEM arrangements that are formed between hardware vendors and Microsoft for delivering and selling bundled desktop machines are probably the closest thing that exists today to what is required. Might Microsoft or even Apple be interested in offering competitively priced VMware virtual machine desktop or server bundles?
The movement to appliance oriented delivery and installation of network services is probably inevitable. The question is who will make a business of it and how. The Google and SalesForce approach is currently to own and manage the whole stack and provide an IP address for the customer to connect to. Will this approach really succeed, or is there something to this virtual appliance approach to service integration and installation that will force the market in another direction?
One thing Apple figured out is that once they dealt with DRM and mirco-charging from a business perspective, the CD was doomed as a mechanism for delivering media. They didn’t need to own the record companies, or the artist labels or the distribution channels to succeed. The value proposition of electronic distribution couldn’t be stopped. Whoever figures out how to solve the business issues with delivering a useful, preconfigured service, built from multiple commercial vendor components, as a prepackaged ISO or VMware image, could cause some serious disruption to current hardware and software delivery models.
itunes, it service, vmware
I just got my 2000t and all of my songs are skipping in iTunes, and I cant figure out why. If someone could help me out and tell me how to fix this I would really appreciate it because its driving me crazy. Thanks for the replys.
Not sure this is the greatest forum for this, but I’ll give it a shot!
This happens to me sometimes when my machine is very, very busy. Maybe you don’t have enough CPU or something else is running that is soaking the box?
What’s a “2000t”?
“We don’t buy dryer parts to construct a dryer, and we shouldn’t be constructing, in most cases, many components of our business systems.”
The goal of the process when using a dryer is to dry clothes. Some are delicate, some are more sturdy, but the process is generally identical for all garments. Business processes are rarely the same from one business to the next, even in the same industry. It makes sense to custom construct business components and it’s one of the main reasons n-tier architectures are so successful. I don’t think the trouble of custom development of business components outweighs the flexibility and efficiency provided by a good implementation.
Your arguments are sound, but the issue is what level of customization is cost-effective? How much needless diversity do we pay for in the current model?
This is a stress that constantly moves solutions toward a commodity approach, but there will always remain some systems and components that resist this treatment, and there will always be novel approaches that make current standards obsolete.
The 90% solution for the vast majority of businesses is packaged solutions such as SAP, Oracle Financials and Great Plains. The cost of customization is so high, many business will adapt and standardize their business processes to these solutions, particularly when the processes provide no strategic business advantage. Business will eliminate diversity that isn’t cost effective.
The n-tier architectural pattern is an evolutionary development that has driven standards for the implementation of interfaces between the tiers and typical patterns for the functions of those tiers.
This would not be possible if the way business systems were constructed 20 years ago had persisted. The concept of a “DBMS” didn’t even exist and products that provided their functions “out of the box” didn’t exist.
The concept of a standards-based application server (J2EE, .NET) evolved over the last 5 or so years. It’s now rare to find applications that employ highly custom non-functional application tier components and services. How many ways does a developer need to connect to a database? Are JDBC and ODBC sufficient for most applications? How many custom connection pooling mechanisms are needed? How many custom authentication mechanisms does the world need?
The argument extends to the way we put these components together for businesses to do the required functional customization. How many LAMP implementations do we need? Aren’t there a small number of web server, application server and database server combinations that suffice for most customers? Who really wants to maintain every permutation of these components? Even for a standard small set of components, their is wide configuration diversity possible. There is a mind-boggling array of configurations possible for a simple Oracle Listener component. There are a number of choices for connecting an Apache Web server to a BEA Web Logic 9.2 application server. In most cases, one configuration is as good as another, and diversity adds no value at all.
Aren’t there a small number of standardized “stacks” that provide the 90%, cost-effective solution for most customers? Right now, there really isn’t much choice but to put these things together yourself if you are a customer, but if there was a choice to purchase pre-configured stacks, which choice would most customers make?
My argument is that the only thing that stands in the way of this is a change in the way these components are licensed and supported. These are business problems not a technical problems, much like the micro-charging and DRM problems Apple solved that make iTunes possible. The contracts and business deals Apple made with the credit card companies and the record labels were far more amazing than the technology. These were the essential and novel details that made iTunes a reality.