I'd like to take a moment to introduce Allan Leinwand, one of my partners here at Panorama Capital.  Allan, like many of us here at Panorama, is a former operating executive, having founded or been on the senior executive team of a number of companies, including Digital Island, Cisco and HP, among others.  Allan is also the founder of Vyatta, a portfolio company that I've posted about here.

One of the areas where Allan has been spending much of his time and effort is on next generation internet infrastructure, which we lovingly refer to here as our "internet systems" roadmap.  The post below is his first installment, which I think you'll find interesting.  Look here for more from Allan in the weeks and months to come.

Virtualization is a key component of the Internet System and the associated investment thesis that I am driving for Panorama Capital. The term virtualization has been thrown around for some time and is a key component of the utility computing movement started a few years back by IBM, HP, Sun Microsystems, and others. In this context, I think of virtualization as the pooling of resources into a single manageable unit that hides the complexity of managing the individual resource pieces. These individual resources may or may not be localized to a single physical location or geography, but they are still managed as a single virtual resource. In the enterprise, virtualization has been focused on optimizing and deploying compute resources appropriately. As an easy example, I tend to think of an IT professional managing a collection of blade servers and associated application software. On the complex side, I've heard of investment banks deploying virtualization software on every PC on a trading floor and then using those compute resources after market hours to compute daily analytics (see grid computing). Products like VMware and XenSource give lots of flexibility here and I am sure IT professionals will make this a big market. Personally, I think that removing all of those dedicated PCs that run one application like the lobby camera, voice-mail or the card-key system justifies exploring virtualization alone! Also, don't get me started on the potential environmental impact from lower power consumption because of fewer servers. Speaking of that, has anyone seen the AMD billboards justifying the lower power consumption of their processors? There is a big one on US101 just south of San Francisco.... And on that note, how do you dispose of large quantities of used servers these days in an environmentally friendly way? Anyway...one area that I am exploring for potential investment is configuration management tools for the virtual environment. How do you deploy an application on a virtual server that may in fact be multiple (10s, 100s, 1000s) physical servers in different geographies? How do you do monitor the resources taken by that application in the IT environment? It's not as easy as running "top" on the server anymore.... I do realize that there are some tools that solve this problem on the market, but I think that we're clearly at the first generation of software to solve this problem. We're not at drag-and-drop simplicity as far as I can tell from reviewing the market. I had a presentation from a utility computing company the other day where the CEO was absolutely boastful of the "complete ease-of-use that our management tools provide". I was anxious to see the demonstration until he started a terminal session and started showing me the command-line interface and parameters required to deploy an application. All in 3 or 4 commands with numerous arcane and proprietary options.... Virtualization is an exciting component of the Internet System - let's make it easier to deploy and manage.

Venture Packets: Virtualization - the first piece of the Internet System

Questions or comments?  Interesting startups that you think we should be watching?  Please don't hesitate to email me.  Talk to you soon.

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