Tomorrow1s Data Center Today

December 3, 2015 Jeff Ferry

Fast-Growing Startup VMTurbo Automates the Modern Data Center

Heard about the software-defined data center? A Google search turns up 38 million hits on this overused phrase. One small company that is doing more than almost anybody else to move us towards the software-defined data center is a Boston startup called VMTurbo. VMTurbo is heading towards $50 million in revenue this year. It has more than 1200 customers, including such blue-chip names as General Electric, Verizon, Coca Cola, Expedia, JP Morgan Chase, UBS Bank, Aetna, and Merck.

VMTurbo makes software that automates allocation of the crucial resources inside today"s data center: virtual machines and the associated virtual RAM memory. VMTurbo CEO Ben Nye points out that server virtualization has transformed the data center. By inserting a software layer between an operating system and the applications, virtualization creates flexibility and fluidity for applications, leading to more efficient use of servers, more reliable infrastructure, and other benefits. Cloud technology itself would not be viable without it, because virtualization provides the flexibility to run multiple users efficiently on a single infrastructure.

But virtualization on its own does not do much to make the data center function more efficiently as resource needs change in real time. "Virtualization is the data center operating system of the future," Nye tells the Daily Cloud. "But to be the operating system of the future, it should do performance management, resource allocation, reservation, and job scheduling. VMTurbo leverages the liquidity [of a virtualized environment] to tell you what workloads to move where, how to size them, and how to shape them." In other words VMTurbo adds a key element of smarts to virtualized infrastructure. The result is an average performance improvement of 37% for VMTurbo customers. That"s pretty substantial when you consider that many enterprises spend tens of millions of dollars on their data center resources.

Mike Campbell is VP of Shared Services for ACI Worldwide (ACIW), a $1 billion payments processor that handles $13 trillion worth of annual transactions for more than 5,000 banks, retailers, and other businesses. Based outside Atlanta, Campbell manages a cloud infrastructure for ACI and provides cloud services to its customers. He operates 5,000 virtual machines (VMs) in his data center. He estimates that deployment of VMTurbo has saved him about $1 million a year in equipment costs and license fees. VMTurbo identifies the resources used by each application and each VM, enabling Campbell to see which resources are under-utilized and which are over-utilized. Campbell found that many of the processors inside his servers were running at only 10% to 15% of their capacity. Armed with this knowledge, he was able to concentrate more applications on those underutilized servers, freeing up resources, cutting down on the capital budget, and—crucially—cutting down on some software license fees which are billed per processor. "VMTurbo talks about a three-month payback which sounds like sales talk, but if you"re running a large enough shop, it can pay back fast," Campbell says. "Optimizing our environment saved us lots of money, especially on Microsoft (MSFT) licenses, and I was amazed at how quick our payback was."

After using VMTurbo as a monitoring tool, Campbell switched to the automated mode, where VMTurbo, closely linked to the VMware (VMW) vSphere virtualization software on ACI"s VMs, moves application workloads in real time, or reallocates VMs to optimize utilization and prevent application slowdowns. "Where VMTurbo shines is in the automated aspect," Campbell explains. "It can make decisions about which guests [VMs] go on which hosts [processors] to make your environment as efficient as possible. I haven"t seen anybody else who can do that."

Mike Campbell-ACIACI's Campbell: amazed at rapid payback The obvious question is what does VMware do in this area. The $6 billion Palo Alto software giant invented virtualization, and while this year it has been distracted by the complex deal in which it is getting sold to Dell, one would expect its large and highly capable engineering team, housed in a serene modern complex interlaced with tree-lined, manmade watercourses high atop a green Palo Alto hillside, to have developed something similar to VMTurbo. And indeed they have. It"s called Dynamic Resource Scheduler. All the customers we spoke to told us they have either used it or looked at it, but found that it is well behind the capabilities of VMTurbo. "VMware made recommendations [for resource allocation] but they weren"t as accurate as VMTurbo"s," says Stephen Baker, Systems Administrator for Underwriters Labs (UL). "VMTurbo takes a lot more factors into account to find the desired state. We trust VMTurbo to manage these resources properly, and it keeps our servers at 70% utilization across the board."

Underwriters Laboratories is a private company and an international authority on product safety with 10,000 employees worldwide. Like ACI, UL manages its own cloud infrastructure, in two data centers in Illinois and Tennessee, and also provides cloud services to its customers. As an authority on product and workplace safety, UL provides training services to many industrial customers, delivered from its cloud infrastructure. VMTurbo helps make sure that those training services meet the service level agreements (SLAs) that are written into customer contracts. "We have tight SLAs and we don"t want to tolerate any downtime," Baker says. "VMTurbo looks at all the hosts and makes sure they are balanced, so we know whether our capacity is at the right level. It does the work of an experienced VMware engineer, and allows us to free up that human brainpower and apply it somewhere else."

Revenue Set To Double

VMTurbo CEO Nye says the average VMTurbo customer saves 20% on operating expense and some 30%-50% on capital expense as a result of using VMTurbo. Before VMTurbo, the typical IT manager would figure out the resources he needed, deploy them, and then wait for something to break (typically, an application would reach capacity and slow down) before adding more resources. VMTurbo enables the system itself to calculate the level of resources needed by each application, and then automatically provide those resources. "You stop playing the supply game and focus instead on demand," Nye says. VMTurbo customers typically find underutilized processors the moment they deploy VMTurbo, so they can realize immediate efficiency gains.

VMTurbo was developed to work with VMware"s dominant vSphere virtualization, but has since expanded its capabilities to work with other popular virtualization platforms, including that of Red Hat (RHT), a strategic investor in VMTurbo. In October, VMTurbo reported its 21st consecutive quarter of revenue growth (like many startups, it doesn"t provide actual figures, so one could call it a virtual quarterly report). However, Nye confirmed to the Daily Cloud that last year"s revenue was $25.1 million, and it"s "on track" to double that this year.

s-kligerFounder Shmuel Kliger: sold previous company for $260M Nye sees the hybrid cloud as the future of enterprise IT, and while VMTurbo focuses primarily on enterprise customers, some of its customers have deployed it within public clouds. "We don"t believe industry will re-platform to the public cloud. You want to move workloads to the cloud and periodically take workloads back. Some applications will be on-premise and some will be off, and some applications will move back and forth," says Nye.

VMTurbo"s founder, Shmuel Kliger, is an Israeli engineer who worked at IBM Research before founding SMARTS, a network monitoring software startup that was acquired by EMC for $260 million in 2005. Kliger founded VMTurbo in 2009. Nye says the core ideas behind VMTurbo, putting applications in control of the infrastructure and enabling them effectively to "shop" for the resources they need, go back to theoretical work done in the 1980s. He sees VMTurbo playing a growing role as a key part of the data center operating system of the future.

"Opportunities to take the entire data center industry and enhance performance, efficiency, and agility are rare…and fascinating," he says. "This is a big idea."