Nick Van Der Zweep

Video interview with Nick Van Der Zweep, Virtualization Director at HP (Part 4/4)

September 14, 2008 by Toon Vanagt 1 Comment

In this fourth and final part of our interview with Nick Van Der Zweep we got some numbers that Virtualization at HP has grown over 80% last year and the claim that HP is

‘growing with VMware faster than VMware is growing in any industry’.

Also because HP has about half of the Blade market and Nick adds that:

‘the connect rate of virtualization to Blade Servers is much heavier than just Standalone Rack Servers. Blades are just an absolute natural fit for virtualization’.

With iVirtualization (not aimed at Apple), HP is adding backward compatible ‘integrated virtualization’ to its Proliant Server range. Another unique feature to the HP iVirtualization is the virtual console which can handle several environments (e.g. VMware, Citrix.) each with their multiple virtual machines. The standard I/O integrated lights out remote console management will automatically connects into the overall console or down right into each of the different VMs within the machine.

Read the full transcript below or return to the previous part

0:11 Could you give us some number on how important virtualization is to HP?

Nick Van Der Zweep: To our business, it’s absolutely critically important and we’re seeing the numbers rolling in from a connect rate perspective.. A few numbers that I know of: integrity systems with the software per virtualization on our Integrity servers grew at about 120% in the last year so that’s a pretty strong growth. VMware numbers I think are public as to how VMware has grown somewhere in the eighty to some percent range which is very good. Our VMware connect rates on our X86 servers have grown beyond that. So we’re growing with VMware faster than VMware is growing in any industry.

Other areas that might be of interest in virtualization space are Blades. The connect rate of virtualization to Blades is much, much heavier than just Standalone Rack Servers. Blades are just an absolute natural fit for virtualization. It was something that we focused on when we designed our C class Blades systems and we’re doing well in the industry because we focused so much on enabling virtualization with that platform. Close to 50% market share in the industry which is outstanding to say the least and then part of what we put in there was HP Virtual Connect in order to make this really work well together, and that was the main product of year for us by a couple of different institutions. It’s really facilitating growth within HP with our management software, Blades, infrastructure virtualization and we’re taking more and more steps with our inside software management and VSC products as well.

2:03 Are we going to see a white ProLiant server soon, because HP launched iVirtualization and I think Apple will be curious to know what that would exactly look like?

Van Der Zweep: Well, actually, we will custom-paint any our infrastructure to match the decor that you want to put it into. So we can comply with whatever color codes that you want to have within your data center.

2:27 I think Steve Jobs is going to be very jealous of that. We can order pink Proliants now ?

Van Der Zweep: Right. If you want it, we can make it. iVirtualization definitely is a key point to us and that goes back to your partnership with VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft. Right out of the box, we get a ProLiant server and instead of saying boot from disc or boot from the network, its boot up the hypervisor, built right into this.

2:55 You’re actually shipping in with an extra flash card where these are precharged?

Van Der Zweep: Exactly and the interesting thing is even before we announced the integrated iVirtualization, we had that ability to add those flash cards. We have the USB capability built into our previous models, so we can upgrade existing models to an integrated virtualization as well. So, what’s inside exactly is that it’s got a USB key with the either ESXI software or for instance Citrix server or that type of software in virtualization.

3:29 From a logistical point of view that sounds like quite a challenge, because you’re shipping from factory… how do you keep close to the release cycles of the hypervisors to make sure you got the latest available version along with the hardware and ship this to the customers?

Van Der Zweep: Yeah because there’re flash drives, we can upgrade them and flash them back into the field as well as if they need upgrades. I think the more important thing is we’re not just putting a flash drive and some VMware, Citrix or such software within the machine, we add value around that as well. So, for instance, we introduced iVirtualization with a virtual console so that when you’re running, for instance, a Citrix environment and you set up multiple virtual machines, our standard I/O integrated lights out remote console management automatically connects into the overall console or down right into each of the different VMs within the machine and that’s again unique in the industry. We’re working so closely with our partners and adding value on top of it instead of just putting a CD in a box.

4:34 What about the virtualization services HP is offering because this technology is so disruptive that many departments seek help to get there?

Van Der Zweep: Yeah. The services that we offer range in spectrum, everything from macro view of data center consolidation and data center transformation services to architect, the physical data centers to look at how to consolidate, how to go from eighty data centers to six similar to some of the initiatives we’ve had even at HP, how to deal with the technology. If you did not touch virtualization technology before, we can train you to be able to implement that, to do capacity planning kinds of initiatives, support you after the facts. So, we’ve got a full range of services that can help you from design all the way through the execution.

5:28 Okay. Nick Van Der Zweep, thanks a lot for the time that you’ve give us and I hope to see you soon.

Van Der Zweep: You’re quite welcome.

Video interview with Nick Van Der Zweep, Virtualization Director at HP (Part 3/4)

September 14, 2008 by Toon Vanagt 2 Comments

In this third part of our video interview with Nick Van Der Zweep, Director for Virtualization at HP, he predicts Desktop Virtualization to be the next big tipping point in our industry. He adds this is one of the areas were HP is differentiating itself from IBM with a full desktop-to-data-center strategy.

“People like IBM are still struggling to catch up to that because they’ve got management systems for every platform that they have and trying to pull that together. That’s critically important to be able to see holistic view of the entire data center…”

But also when it comes to flexible and usage-based data center pricing models and cloud computing, Nick claims HP is a pioneer with clients such as Dreamworks, rendering their movies on HP’s excess infrastructure.

The Opsware acquisition is referred to often in this interview when it comes to HP offering the full broad enterprise management software and configuration management with server automation. Nick also hints at their current investments in Virtualization related security offerings.

The interview was recorded at the HP headquarters in Cupertino, where Nick is often asked by financial analysts: ‘Is virtualization bad for your business?”. His clear answer is “NO”, as it unlocks the potential for businesses to do more and enables HP to sell a lot more robust configurations with a larger amount of condensed CPUs, much more memory, more I/O capability, etc.

Nick also shines a light on the future of virtualization, which will have (mostly free) hypervisors as a commodity. What really unlocks virtualization however is the management software and related automation capabilities. This is why HP bought and integrated a company like Opsware.

Read the full transcript below or read the previous part here or move on to the last episode.

So, we differentiate ourselves from IBM today by covering this desktop to data center that got out off the whole desktop space and this is going to explode. Desktop virtualization is absolutely going to explode and that’s the next kind of big tipping point that we’re seeing. Integrated and we’re not afraid to take our technology off of our high-end systems, our nonstop UNIX systems. We’re not afraid to put it on X86 and we put it there early and fast because that’s where the market needs it. And so we’re proactively pushing that there. For instance with our latest release, we took a whole bunch of technology that was only on Integrity and UNIX and brought it to Windows and X86. So, desktop to data center, fully integrated stack up our management software, systems insight manager for a number of years has been able to manage across our entire portfolio of Integrity, Proliant, et cetera. People like IBM are still struggling to catch up to that because they’ve got management systems for every platform that they have and trying to pull that together. That’s critically important to be able to see holistic view of the entire data center.

1:19: Virtualizations is actually also enabling cloud computing and grid computing and all of these which are no longer coming from expensive mainframe hardware but virtual power through G4 X86 type of servers, and this brings us to usage-based pricing models. HP has been in there. Did you have plans on offering infrastructure as a service or data center as a service?

Van Der Zweep: So today, we already do sets of infrastructure service. Data center has its service capabilities. We certainly offer our Integrity servers on a usage basis where you buy the capacity almost like a prepaid mobile card where you buy 30 CPU days, and as you use it, it takes down in 30 minute increments. We also have adaptive infrastructure as a service. We’re taking all of our capabilities of virtualization, automation, etcetera, in helping customers move to what we call an adaptive infrastructure and next generation data center. And we’ve implemented that ourselves and provide that as a service to our customers. This goes back to many years ago, four or five years ago for instance with DreamWorks, where DreamWorks wants this kind of environment where to render films, they’ve got a certain amount of capacity themselves but there’s peak times when they really need to get busy and so, we’ve got a whole set of technology, a whole set of data centers that can handle excess capacity, excess requirements from them to render films. So we worked with DreamWorks and others to render films, do this in the manufacturing industry and others. And it’s all paid by the direct kind of pricing.

3:09: Okay. What about HP server automation technology? I know you’re a Virtualization Director. How easy is it for all those administrators to use that and to deploy everything?

Van Der Zweep: It was a very strategic acquisition for us to get into the whole infrastructure automation space, server automation, with the Opsware products and tying right back into server automation and configuration management. Our infrastructure is very much the best infrastructure in the industry in providing management software there to advantage the infrastructure and some of that I’ve been describing. But these all plugs in to our full broad enterprise management software and configuration management, and server automation as well. The nice thing about teaming this together, you’ve got the ability to very quickly change your infrastructure but with the server automation, very quickly be able to change your applications, commission or decommission web servers and application servers quickly, and then with our infrastructure be able to redeploy those assets. So, you have to do those two things in conjunction with each other. It makes a lot of sense to put that on portfolio.

4:26: Up to now, we talked a lot about the good new things virtualization can bring, but these new relationships between guest and host systems also popped up a lot of security issues. It’s still very new although it’s been there for a few years. It’s still quite a new technology. How do you think virtualization security issues can be addressed?

Van Der Zweep: Well, I think that’s evolving. We’ve definitely been working with the vendors, the VMwares, the Citrix, our own technologies to make sure that the software is very hardened. We’re looking at trusted computing models that can work in this industry as well. Certainly, we’ve had those working bare-metal physical machines to get that working more so in the virtualization space. So, I think that’s evolving over time. We’ve got many offerings today to be able to help in this space but that’s another area of investment for us.

Video interview with Nick Van Der Zweep, Virtualization Director at HP (Part 2/4)

September 14, 2008 by Toon Vanagt 2 Comments

In this second part of our lengthy video interview with Nick Van Der Zweep, Director for Virtualization at HP, we get further introduced to how HP defines virtualization and how it differentiates from its competitors.

Nick also shares what typical Virtualization problems his clients are grappling with and what skill set is needed in IT departments to overcome the pitfalls.

Read the full transcript below, return to part 1 or go ahead to part 3

0:12 HP has one of the most complete virtualization solutions offerings. How are these portfolios integrated?
Nick Van Der Zweep: That’s really where we started with some of our management software as I mentioned in the Integrity space back in 1999-2000.We had high availability and partitioning and pay-as-you-go and instant capacity in management software and we glued it all together so that we produce one-user interspace to that environment. Just recently, we announced and started shipping last month Inside Dynamics which takes that software, makes it available to go to Integrity, ProLiant, X86. One management footprints Systems Inside Manager which is known across the industry as one management software for ProLiant, Integrity, Discovery, fault management and from there it manages all the hypervisors up there, we can…

1:08 Does it do deployment automatically?

Van Der Zweep: So, we’ve got deployment built in to it so through a WRAP Deployment Packet of deployed into bare-metal and they’re deployed to virtual machines. We support Citrix, VMware, Microsoft and so we took that software that higher level of management software Inside Dynamic VSC which represent VSC in the integrity space and really glued it together. What’s really interesting right now is that we can provide hypervisor-like capabilities even to bare metal machines and that interface brings that all together. You can’t even tell if you’re working on bare-metal machine versus a VMware hypervisor. You can do moves from moving application from place to place within the infrastructure and whether be bare metal or its using VMware behind the scenes so definitely heavy integrated.

2:05 I’m very interested to know how HP views its competitive landscape in the virtualization industry?

Van Der Zweep: I think, we are extremely well positioned in the industry to be able to help our customers in the whole virtualization space and then also help HP and our shareholders as well. And because we’ve got the capabilities of covering this from desktop to the data center, we have a huge what we call a personal systems group where we sell desktops, Thin clients, Blade PCs, virtual desktop environments. So we are heavily invested in that side of the technology as well as the server side technology as well. Storage virtualization, server virtualization, we have a huge multi-billion dollar software organization within HP to deliver infrastructure management, our Opsware/Mercury capabilities are layered on top of that as well. So, we’ve got a technological portfolio that I think is a number one bar in the industry that anybody looks at. And then the services portfolio to be able to help customers, architectural data centers, to data center transformations, look at everything from power cooling environmental pieces of the puzzle because that’s comes in to virtualization very quickly as well as you know because we can design the data centers, and as well help people and customers to do installation support and ITIL practice because as you go into a shared environment and now your employees are sharing resources. Well you better standardize the jobs across the data centers. So the people who are doing server administration are all doing it the same way, not doing it one way for SAP environment and another way for their Exchange environment, because it’s all shared infrastructure.

3:59 Do you think we need a new skill set out there? Now their tasks are merging: for the networking people and security people and storage people. They’re really now have to talk together?

Van Der Zweep: They absolutely do. So, there are two things that happen that we focus on that. I think it’s really happening to the industry. One is standardizing their roles and responsibilities so that and their interlocks so that they can talk to each other. But then again we do things that simplify the processes, automate the processes. If you look at the likes of Opsware or even our Blade environment, we added something called virtual connect to our Blade environment putting in a virtual fabric, a virtual back plain. Now, what we’re able to do with Virtual Connect Blades and Inside Dynamics is move a Microsoft Exchange environment running on one blade through a point and click, move it to another Blade in another enclosure. If you try to do that today within a typical datacenter, you’ve got to call up the server guy to install that on the new Blade. You have to call the network guy up and have them move the VLAN information from that node to that node and you have to call up the SAN storage guy to say “I’m going to reroute all the SAN in order to make that movement happen”. Whether or not you have hypervisors or not, you got to set all of these up three people which means a week worth of work. We can do it point and click everything is automated. All the steps happened and it’s done. So, it’s a matter of working better together from a people perspective but also delivering technologies that bust through the processes of the past and automate them as well.

5:43 What are the typical issues that your customers are grappling with today?

Van Der Zweep: The typical issues that they grapple with today certainly is out of macro level cost, how do we drive down cost agility, how do I be more responsive to the business so that when they say, “Hey I’m one of deploy infrastructure or new application or scale up I want to do that today. I don’t want to do that in a month,” and then service levels. People are constantly saying I’m moving towards more of an environment where instead of that it’s just one mission critical system on that one server that keeps the business running, everything is kind of connected together with the applications that we have today, services oriented architectures and such where you’ve got ten or hundreds of pieces of infrastructure that are working in concept which each other and you have to have a high availability to everything and so they are want to get that built in without complex clustering.

6:45 What about the greener side of ITs, there is also a lot of buzz around the green data centers, do you find that your customers –due to boosting energy costs- are looking for for cheap electricity bills and renewable energy sources and are they actually looking at what is this server consuming and if that’s being underutilized to have like lesser power being consumed?

Van Der Zweep: Absolutely. So, we have customers especially in the enterprise based that have data centers that within the next what three, four, five years they do not have enough power to handle the growth where is that they’re having within that environment. Well, they’d have to build an entire new data centers and that’s cost thing. And they don’t feel good about it from an environmental perspective and the cost that they pay to the utilities. So they’re concerned about that. So virtualization can help there with the software that I described with Inside Dynamics, what we built into this release is that we’ve put in the ability to do consolidation and it will automatically come back to you with scenarios. Here is your current scenario, and this is exactly how many kilowatts you’re using per month and you enter into it. You tell what your rates are, so it says you’re paying three hundred and fifty dollars a month for these systems for energy. And then it comes back and says, “Well here is the new environment consolidated using virtualization.” And we can actually tell you its hundred fifteen dollars a month is your exact energy cost that you would be paying versus today versus option A or maybe option B or C that was exciting when we were in Barcelona demonstrating this and we had four people deep and four people wide sitting in front of one screen looking at this and one person is going I need you to put in my rates for Sweden and share this because I got to bring this home. It’s a hot area.

Video interview with Nick Van Der Zweep, Virtualization Director at HP (Part 1/4)

September 2, 2008 by Toon Vanagt 1 Comment

In this first part of our lengthy video interview (4 parts) with Nick Van Der Zweep, Director for Virtualization at HP, we get introduced to how HP defines virtualization as flowing computing resources around and how this drops your costs and increases agility from desktop virtualization to data center virtualization and storage.

Apart from its top-range Integrity platform, with the HP-UX operating system, (deeply virtualized since 1999), HP is absolutely not entering the X86-market with a proprietary hypervisor. With products like Inside Dynamics, HP reaches into third party hypervisor software and manipulates those virtualization layers agnostically for multiple vendors. Nick is very happy with the excellent responsiveness from the X86 virtualization leaders and claims HP is the number one partner for VMware, Citrix and Microsoft.

Read the full transcript below.

0:12 Nick Van Der Zweep, welcome on Virtualization.com. You are the director for virtualizationat HP. We are at your Cupertino headquartersand you’ve got the longest job title I’ve come across in a while. I think that illustrates how disruptive this virtualization technology is to the industry. Could you tell us something more about that?

Van Der Zweep: So virtualization for HP is all about pooling and sharing of resources so that the supply of resources can meet the demand from a business demand. The idea is to move away from silos of resources, servers, networking, software, and storage, that is dedicated on an application by application basis, more to a pooled set of resources that can flow and ebb and flow to the application on demand. You want to be able to do that automatically so that automatically when one application needs more resources, they automatically flow to it, although that’s scary for a large amount of IT organizations out there to have automatic reallocation of resources. So at a minimum, you want to have the ability to just type in a command to reroute resources very, very quickly, instantaneously even, from one place to another. So virtualization to us is everything from desktop virtualization, to data center virtualization, storage, etc. But ultimately, it’s all about flowing those resources around, dropping your costs, increasing your agility.

1:43 What types of virtualization does HP support?

Van Der Zweep: Well, we’re investing heavily in all aspects of virtualization. Like I said, desktop to data center, desktop virtualization, thin clients, storage virtualization, that started years ago and it’s back into a renaissance again with some of the capabilities that are out there. Server raid virtualization absolutely top of mind, to folks as well, the software, software virtualization, management software around it. So, all the technology aspects for sure and then services because this is new to a large amount of companies. So services, plan for it, plan consolidation, data center transformations, implement the technologies, help people through cultural changes as they move to a shared environment as well. Because that’s another probably one of the biggest sticky factor as well is you’ve got to move to a mode where you’re sharing with your co-workers, your infrastructure instead of having dedicated and that’s a bit of a wall sometimes.

02:51 I’m interested to know if virtualization was expected to lower hardware sales because people are finally going to be better utilizing their hardware. But it turns out that it’s actually quite good for hardware sales and HP is one of the ones that has benefited of this movement. Which elements does one need to get better performing hardware to do virtualization the right way?

Van Der Zweep: Yeah, classic question that we hear all the time. Usually the question is not from technical people, but from the financial analysts and goes “is this bad for your business”? But it absolutely is good and this even goes back to ’98 when I was doing the consolidation program. People would ask, is this bad for you business? It isn’t. It’s good, because it unlocks the potential for businesses to do more and because they are frustrated because they have a hundred projects to do but they can only afford a certain amount of infrastructure and a certain amount of projects so this really allows them to do a lot more. And then from a net-net to HP we see a lot more robust configurations going out the door, so a larger amount of CPUs within it, much, much more memory within the systems, more I/O capability so there are very much richer systems that they can run many applications on top.

4:11 It’s more condensed, more cores.

Van Der Zweep: More cores and more memory. Memory is a big one; more I/O is a big one. And then because virtualization causes a lot of sprawl as well—virtualization sprawl. While you might have had a hundred servers before you install virtualization, you go to twenty servers but, pretty quickly, you’ve got 200 images of OSes running, so you need better management software to manage that ecosystem, where as you might have done it manually before. You’ve got to put in management software, virtualization management and then automation comes into play. Hence, things like our investment in automation, in buying companies like Opsware as well.

4:56 Where do you think virtualization is headed?

Van Der Zweep: You know that’s an interesting one. I think it’s going to move fast. It’s been moving fast. I don’t think it’s going to slow down. To a large extent the hypervisors are going to commoditize. People are seeing a lot of that moving on.

5:13 Prices are dropping or even free.

Van Der Zweep: Prices are dropping, free open source, a lot of activity in that space. Management software virtualization or management software automation is what really unlocks virtualization. Those core hypervisors give some basic functionality but that software really unlocks the power to deliver, reduce cost, better agility, and high availability—those types of things. That is where the value is showing up. So we’re going to see a lot more of that.To be honest I don’t think there’s anybody in the industry that can really predict what it’s going to look like in five or six years because this thing is moving so fast that if anybody says, “I can tell you exactly where virtualization is going,” I just walk away, because it’s going to change dramatically again over the next number of years as well.

6:10 HP hasn’t built its own hypervisor. You chose to offer your clients the choice between VMware, Xen, and Hyper-V. You ship them with the hardware?

Van Der Zweep: It’s actually a combination. We do have our own hypervisor for our Integrity platform, so on that platform we have an HP-UX operating system, the partitioning, hypervisor, management software, and we deeply virtualized back since 1999-2000. In the X86 space, we absolutely are not entering the market with the hypervisor. VMware is out there and Microsoft is out there with virtual server but Hyper-V is if it’s not today it’s soon to be generally available.Citrix, acquiring XenSource and the other Xen open source environments and Linux with KVM. There is plenty of work going on in the hypervisor space. We are trying to enable on top of that, add management to be on top that. Our products like HP Insight Dynamics-VSE reach into and manipulate and use VMware’s software and manipulate that virtualization layer.

7:23: How happy are you with the support of these partners? VMware and Xen service or technology partners?

Van Der Zweep: So they’re very responsive us and we’ve got a very good relationship with them. We’re the number one partner of VMware in the industry, the number one partner of Microsoft in the industry, and the number one partner of Citrix in the industry. So they tend to jump when we give them a call saying, “Hey we’re looking at integrated hypervisors or building management software around it.” They know they get a huge addressable market by working very, very close with us. So they’ve been very responsive.