Virtualization, clouds, and zettabytes

Humans will create about 1.2 zettabytes of data in 2010

In 2007, Cisco Systems made a $150 million equity investment VMware, expecting the investment to help spur even more interest in virtualization among their customers. At the time the move fit well with Cisco's push into virtualization across the data center. At the Cisco Live 2007 end-user conference, it was stated that Cisco was building out a data center specialization strategy that would focus on network infrastructure, storage networking, and application networking.

In January 2009, Cisco challenged HP and IBM in a server market that those two companies dominated. In a report in The New York Times by Ashlee Vance, Cisco's server line's selling point will be its "sophisticated virtualization software." The company's chief technology officer Padmasree Warrior said Cisco saw the move "not as a new market, but a market transition."

In a press release in March of 2009, Cisco and VMware announced a comprehensive, strategic original equipment manufacturer (OEM) agreement which incorporated product engineering and integrated sales and support strategies for datacenter virtualization and unified computing. The Cisco/VMware relationship began to provide a foundation for next-generation cloud-based services. The press listed one of the key benefits of the agreement as giving customers the choice of deploying and managing applications on internal or external clouds, or deploying them into federated “private” clouds for even greater scalability.

In February of this year, HyTrust raises $10.5 million for boosting hypervisor security. Some of this funding came from Cisco, although the funding announcement did not say how much of the $10.5 million was contributed by Cisco. Prior to receiving investment funds from Cisco, HyTrust had integrated its own products with Cisco's Unified Computing System.

In March of this year, Cisco introduced the foundation for next-generation Internet: The Cisco CRS-3 Carrier Routing System. This re-engineered Internet will deliver video-based experiences, using the network, the cloud and data center, to any end point – a TV screen, a laptop screen or even a mobile handset," says Kelly Ahuja, who oversees Cisco's routing portfolio for service providers. "It's no longer about networking or routing alone," says Ahuja. "It's about the convergence of network, compute and storage, which drives the virtualization aspect." The Cisco CRS-3 will scale up to 322 Tbps.

At the same time, a recent EMC article outlines the fact that humans created 800 exabytes of data in 2009 and, based on the growth of 62% over 2008’s data, suggests that humans will create about 1.2 zettabytes in 2010. Meanwhile, Backblaze builds their own custom Storage Pods: a 67 terabyte 4U server which goes for under $8000. In 2005,
I was told virtualization was a fad that wouldn’t last. Based on what has been happening with virtualization, cloud computing and zettabytes, I doubt that it’s a passing fad.

• Cisco
• cloud computing
• virtualization