CEO Reflections

Two hot topics in IT today are virtualization and cloud computing. Hosted applications, i.e. cloud services, are essentially delivering virtualized services. In Egnyte's case we are going beyond the normal Software as a Service (SaaS) with a more data intensive Data as a Service (DaaS) solution. The Egnyte Cloud File Server is a classic example.However, there is another dimension to this. The role of virtualization in helping deliver cloud services has become significant. It enables the service provider to manage the footprint of computing resources more easily, helps bound process footprints within the confines of the virtual machine, and enables scaling of operations remarkably faster. For example, at Egnyte a lot of critical processes are deployed on multiple virtual machines within one server. Typically, these are non disk or io intensive, "batch" oriented processes. Indeed, some process, like DB writes fit better on a non virutal environment. We recently doubled the processing capacity in one data center within 3 days, all due to previously configured virtual machines.Another dimension of virtualization we are leveraging is in deploying the Enterprise Local Cloud. Now, our customers can deploy the Hybrid Cloud solution and repurpose existing servers and storage. The power of virtualization has made the Local Cloud solution device agnostic.One area that I find fascinating is virtualization at the desktop level. I am not sure if this area has been defined well enough or is mature enough and frankly, am still thinking on what we should do with the capability. If you have any suggestions, please post your comments below.