My 2008 IT Forecasting Crap

Oh, look, another person making predictions for the coming year. How amazing. How exciting. How stupid. Yes. It is stupid. But I have some time to kill, so why not add my 2 cents to the mountain of coinage already piling up on the web?

• Virtualization - Both operating systems and packaged/sequenced applications, will gain popularity in 2008. Look for an increase in the number of projects looking to deploy EMC's VMware, Microsoft's Hyper-V, Xen, and others in the data center. In addition, look for more cases of Microsoft Application Virtualization (formerly called "SoftGrid") deployments.
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• Apple will March Onward - Look for a new iPhone in 2008 with many of the features current users are yearning for. Also, look for a new handheld/UMPC form factor device for mobile browsing or possibly something akin to the Sony Reader or Amazon Kindle products. The IPod product line needs some sort of boost, so look for increased storage capacities per line.
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• Windows Server 2008 - What can I say. I love it. I love Linux also, but WS08 is one of the finest products I've seen come out of Microsoft in years. Very well designed and built. I would have liked to see a more thorough method of building "Server Core" than simply decoupling existing hooks, but it's a very bold and risky first-generation attempt. It works, so that's the biggest issue, and it will be accepted very well in 2008 along with the rest of the (GUI) WS08 product line.
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• Vista will continue to struggle - Even with the added benefits of coupling it with WS08 (hence the marketing mantra "Better Together" you're going to start getting sick of hearing). There's still too thin of a rationale for justifying the expense, overhead, and deployment effort for most large environments. Most are going to defer their efforts towards further XP deployings using Service Pack 3. Unless Microsoft makes some dramatic changes in how Vista is packaged and sold, most companies are going to stick with XP until Windows 7 ships in 2009.
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• Microsoft System Center will Do Well - Both Configuration Manager (SCCM) and Operations Manager (SCOM) will become more popular by Spring of 2008. Look for more projects involving those products.
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• Microsoft SharePoint 2007 - AKA "MOSS" will continue to gain momentum in small to medium business environments in 2008. Larger environments will also see increased uptake but as a percentage of overall IT time/labor it won't compare with smaller environments who can adapt their workflows and methods to a new platform much more quickly and easily.
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• Linux will Continue to Struggle - On the desktop. Yes. It will. As much as nay-sayers like to bash Microsoft over Vista and what-not, Linux is simply not an option for most medium to large environments. I won't go into the usual shopping list of reasons why, but suffice it to say, that running Linux with Wine and/or Xen to force-fit difficult Windows apps is just a dumb idea to propose in a boardroom meeting. It would get you fired immediately. The Linux world needs to take a lead for once, instead of continually saying "we can do that also!" and jumping up and down in the back of the room. Do something REALLY unique, not just different. There's a million ways to accomplish media streaming, web services, file sharing, authentication, mobile applications development, and virtualization. Those are done. Do something Windows and OSX haven't done.
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• Google will try more Hail Mary's - Google has become laiden with overgrowth of corporate proportions. It has become increasingly similar to what it intended to avoid: Another Microsoft. Rapid growth, hiring, scaling out, and the overhead that automatically incurs, have all placed a massive drag on Google's ability to innovate rapidly. Most of 2007 has been evolutions and tweaks, as opposed to revolutions like we saw from them in 2004-2005. Do something with the Gmail interface for God's sake! Where's the huge lead you had over Microsoft? News flash: MS is catching up on you. Slowly, for sure, but they always do. Look for Google to make a few major releases or announcements in 2008 to help regain their lead in various areas. Hopefully, they do more than that.
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• Microsoft will Continue to Expand - The Zune 2.0 is only a mid-term effort. Look for a more impressive push in that market to compete with Apple. IE8 will be another significant announcement, as will a bevy of "cloud" computing services for small-medium customers. Aside from the expected releases of Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 will also gain momentum in 2008, along with .NET 3.5 and 4.x later in 2008. Incubator products and technologies like Silverlight-oriented toolkits, tons of goodies that have come out of the birthing room known as MSR, and all sorts of things in between (XBox 360, MSN, Live, etc)
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• Firefox 3.0 will do well - If Mozilla can manage to avoid stuffing too much bloat into 3.0 like they did with 2.0, and continue to impress with faster rendering performance and slicker features, it will do very well. Maybe well enough to push back against increased spread of IE7 and IE8. Opera will continue to decline. Safari will grow on OSX but decline on Windows platforms as a result of IE8 and FF3 popularity in 2008.

2008: The year of server flipping

We've all heard too much about "flipping houses" on various TV shows, magazines, web sites, etc. The practice of buying a "fixer-upper", fixing it upper, and then selling it for a profit, is a respectable effort (even a profession in some cases). But how does this fit with the IT world?

Simple: It fits with virtualization and existing hardware. A lot of the buzz being regurgitated on the web today is about how much virtualization will play in data center plans for 2008. There are all sorts of reasons and rationale provided. The interesting thing is how the various offerings will "fit" with respect to budgets and refresh cycles in most medium/large data center environments.

Many big spenders just finished a round of big spending, so it may be a tough thing for many IT managers to gently pry open the boardroom door again and kindly ask for more funding to chase after yet another enticing goal. The benefits are easy enough to justify and bulletize:

• Run more roles on less hardware
• Reduce electricity costs (hardware, cooling, etc.)
• Portability and failover simplification (aka Disaster Recovery)
• blah blah blah

Then comes the clincher: How much?

Well, the answer is, as always: "It depends".

On what? Well, you may be able to leverage your existing hardware, but that depends on which virtualization platform product line you intend to pursue. EMC's VMware ESX Server, Microsoft's upcoming Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server products, and open source (sort of) products by Xen and others, each have their own hardware limitations with respect to the physical host machine. That said, in a perfect world, many will be more than happy to buy new hardware with the latest and greatest goodies built-in, and begin consolidating their older machines into VM guest instances on the newer box. But in reality, many will be forced (by the evil budget folks) to make-do with existing hardware. In many cases that will mean hardware that won't run 64-bit products.

What to do?

Many will roll up their sleeves, drink some coffee, tell a few bad jokes, and while everyone is trying hard to laugh (like it was really funny), the IT tech will be switfly wiping a box and reloading with something like Linux and VMware Server 2.0, both of which are FREE and run just fine on 32-bit hardware. Ideal? Not really. But then again, define "Ideal". It is an entirely subjective term, like my other favorite terms: good, great, ok, fine, not too bad, and my favorite of favorites - so-so.

I will call this "flipping servers", since it's not moving things (servers) from older hardware to virtual instances on newer hardware. It will be ripping the walls and floors out and rebuilding the insides of the house and moving all new appliances and furniture (and tenants) in. Slick-n-reload as many refer to it.

So, for 2008, I see a considerable amount of server flipping in the pipeline. Everyone wants to virtualize and consolidate and gain from the benefits. But many don't have the budget or the cojones to ask for a budget increase to do it the way the vendors recommend. And is this really a failure? Hell no. Not by a long shot. It's getting the job done within imposed constraints. And in most cases it will work just fine. Maybe not for the likes of eBay, Amazon.com, or WSJ, but for most small-medium business data center environments (ok, "server rooms" for most of us), it will be what works and be affordable and attainable.