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Guy Churchward is the General Manager of the Java Runtime Products Group for BEA systems and responsible for bringing the JRockit JVM and BEA's virtualization vision to market. Guy's a 20 year veteran of the industry with extensive international experience in engineering, sales, strategy and market development. Previous companies included Sun Microsystems (AKA Tarantella Inc.), Santa Cruz Operations, Olivetti and Arthur Anderson.

Not all fairy tales are fictional

The king traveled to the local wizard to seek advise on this quandary, the wizard waved his hands mysteriously over his crystal ball and showed the king the possibility of a new life of smaller cheaper counters called an ‘abacus’, that can be used directly by the villagers without risk of accidental ingestion and offer the ability to not only count the kings taxes but also perform tasks that are most pertinent to local interest such as swamp algae cultivation or micro deforestation, thus distributed computing was born.

The King was thrilled by the change, gone were the days he had to answer to the dragon keeper, gone the inflexibility of the Tin dragon, the accidental reductions in workforce and the high price paid for specialist dragon dietitians.

A few years later, whilst gliding through the silky glades of his kingdom, the King was perplexed because, that although the Tin dragon had been replaced by sleek smaller cheaper counters, the cost of managing this distributed abacus network had escalated quite dramatically and once a year when the peasants were required to provide their ‘king appreciation tax’, the larger villages required more power than a single abacus which led to inaccurate calculations and in some case false imprisonment for tax evasion.

The King once again traveled to seek advice from the wizard, who pondered and thought thought and pondered until he revealed a cunning plan to split up the larger taxation tasks from the challenged villages and apportion part of the counting to villages that had spare cycles to allow the counting to happen faster.

The King implemented such a plan, he managed to accelerate the taxation process and immediately showed that with a distributed network of abacus devices, you could use available cycles to act as ‘tin dragon’, thus the birth of grid.

Over the next few years, at the same time each year, the King’s specially trained carrier pigeons, a special albino breed (White throated schedulers) who would fly to the Abacus workers to see if they have spare capacity and use them for counting his taxes. In most cases this worked just fine, but as the abacus workers became more established in the village, the workers locked the abacus away in fear of contamination which started to make the grid sporadic and unreliable in its efficiency.

This left the King in a taxing situation, although there was potential to use the distribution of such devices, without a predictable measure it was impossible to provide a guaranteed level of service which was exacerbated by the spiraling costs of managing a distributed network of abacus devices.

The king once again returned to the wizard and asked for his wisdom, the wizard thought and pondered, pondered and thought and in a puff of smoke, came up with an idea to centralize the abacuses in a specially designed abacus building to ‘pool resources’ and create the ability to further partition each abacus, so instead of using three rows of beads you can actually allow three people to work on one row each at the same time as many of the abacus workers traditionally used only one row. The partitioning was called isolation and the special stool to accommodate three different people at the same time was called a hyper-visitor which was latterly shortened to hypervisor.

The king was once again happy; he did suffer a little from hot working conditions and had to install fans on the ceiling to help with heat dissipation through having such a dense utilized abacus facility.

This new model had virtually the same abilities as the tin dragon and virtually the same cost as the distributed cheap abacus's but also allowed a high level of utilization and a higher capability to schedule guaranteed results. The king decided to call this virtualization for a liquid infrastructure.

So Grid had in a strange quirk of fate been the first use case for virtualization.

Once the king had this facility running smoothly he started to offer capacity as a service to other kingdoms and charged them on a result basis, he decided to call this on demand utility bartering. The lords of course wanted to ensure their taxes were done on time so insisted that the king signed a legal agreement or SLA to make sure their workload was executed at a previously agreed rate.

Before long, the king had created the most efficient cost effective way to execute taxation, he also discovered that other kings had followed suit and created a similar utility but for poultry management, guard payroll, security from Trojans, single guard sign in etc. The king thought if there was a way to harness each of these assets in some reusable way, you could offer them to other states or countries as a service orientated asset base or architecture.

This completed the final piece in the puzzle, before long they provided service orientated activities across the land and across the globe, the model started centralized with a high cost, went low cost and distributed, gained efficiency through grid, centralized to provide controls and virtualization, sourced through a utility model and then offered out in a service orientated manner.

So the moral of this story is, some fairy tales aren’t fiction.

October 2007

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Not all fairy tales are fictional

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Interview Series: Event-Driven SOA
In this interview, Guy Churchward writes about event-driven SOA and event-driven architecture. Jun. 20, 2007

Arch2Arch Podcast 1: Trends in Virtualization and Event Driven Architectures
Kevin Faulkner interviews Guy Churchward, BEA Vice President of WebLogic Products - to discuss trends in the industry and new product developments at BEA around virtualization and event driven architectures. Products covered include WebLogic Server Virtual Edition, LiquidVM and WebLogic Event Server. Jun. 5, 2007

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