Patriotism

Whether or not you voted for Barack Obama, the past week provides a moving example of what makes America great.  People shed the cynicism that has pervaded the country for the last few months (at least) and headed to the polls to display the shining idealism that both McCain and Obama inspired during their campaigns.  Instead of resorting to the tactical pragmatism that divided our country along social and economic issues, they focused on change and hope.  As we start a new week, confronted with new economic challenges, the dramatic events of last week make me proud to be an American.

The Obligation

Something about Lance Armstrong always seemed to leave me less than impressed.  Obviously his mountain (no pun intended) of Tour de France wins placed him at the all time pinnacle of cycling.  However, as a baseball, football, and golf fan, that never seemed like a world changing thing to me.  That changed last Tuesday night.  During the closing keynote of Citrix Summit, Lance took the stage and told the simple, but very powerful story of his fight with cancer and its results in his life.

 

At that moment, he repositioned himself in my mind.  Instead of remaining the aloof icon of a not entirely mainstream sport, he became a human being and a hero.  Oddly though, he did it by talking about something that people face every day and that did not necessarily set him apart from his peers.  He talked about obligation.  In his case, he talked about how the fight with cancer created an obligation in his life to raise cancer awareness and promote research towards a cure.  He talked about how that obligation gave him a significant portion of the discipline and the drive to win all of those cycling titles. 

 

However, I did not walk out of the session hall thinking about his triumphant life and inspiring dedication, although I respect and admire both of those things very much now.  What remained in my mind afterwards was that concept of obligation.  What Lance called an obligation really seemed like the certain recognition of his life’s higher calling.  Obviously, there are significant religious topics that can enter into the discussion here, but I’ll focus on the lesson that seems to apply to organizations and knowledge workers.  How often do companies have the chance to offer their employees and stakeholder’s the sense of obligation and purpose that would drive them to repeatedly win the Tour de France in their field?  How would such a company compete with other organizations in their market?  What would the impact be on retention, recruitment, and results?

 

As you can tell by all of these questions, I didn’t end up with a lot of answers after Armstrong’s talk.  That short half hour though, did give me an insightful and inspiring vision into what it takes to drive and win at his level.  It became apparent that desire, effort, and talent could not beat his obligation to win.

Concurrent Heavy Workloads

Even with our fantastic engineering team at Varrow, our presales organization sometimes struggles with this common customer question... "Is there a good way to go from a virtual guest to a physical server?"

At Citrix Summit this week though, I had one of those "ah hah" moments that simple elegant solutions can cause. During one of the presales architectural sessions, an emerging Citrix product called Provisioning Server (PVS) was included in a diagram as a way to stream guest images to either physical or virtual environments. The "ah hah" that I experienced was caused by the realization that if you can choose which environment you are streaming to, then you can use the management capabilities of PVS to migrate images from virtual to physical environments and back again.

Sounds like I got caught up in a "geek out" moment right? What's the business implication here? Well, all of those trouble workloads in your datacenter that are only virtualization candidates some of the time can now be migrated back and forth from bare metal hardware depending on the business demands of your users. A database server that gets pounded during the financial close of each period can be moved to a physical server during that high use time and moved back into your virtual environment during the rest of the year. Just like some software companies have a concurrent user licensing model, you can use PVS to scale your physical server environment according to the number of "concurrent heavy workloads" that you have at any given time. Maybe, you could even engineer flexible leasing terms that let you increase and decrease your physical server count according to your seasonal business needs.