VMTN Blog

A student asked a zen master "What is the value of virtualization -- redshift or blueshift?" The zen master answered "Mu."

Ben Rockwood at Joyent:

I was asked to co-present with an engineer from Sun at an upcoming conference in October. I asked him to do his slides and then shoot me over the presentation so I could fill in my half. I noticed that his view of virtualization and mine were very different. To put it into jargon speak, there is a difference between Redshift virtualization and Blueshift virtualization. ...

Essentially it says that there are two different classes of business: “blueshift” companies that grow according to GDP and are essentially over-served by Moore’s Law that computing power doubles every two years, and “redshift” companies that grow off the charts, and which are grossly under- served by Moore’s Law.

i.e., blueshift is server consolidation and redshift is dynamically bring new servers up quickly on your virtual infrastructure.  Zen blade master Martin MacLeod says that is the wrong answer -- the value of virtualization is really in transforming your business process in both slow- and fast-growth businesses.

Martin MacLeod at Blade Watch:

But where virtualization really brings benefits is in the non-technical arena. The ability to turn it all around, to be a real business enabler, that the IT infrastructure can grow and adapt in line with the business need, that we move to a system of service provisioning where IT handle everything and provide the business with the virtual instance, a world where I can request a server for a month to test that .NET framework 3.0 works ok with my application, then give it back, where I can be allocated more processing power or memory in minutes not weeks due to the purchasing process needing sign off, processing and parts delivery.