Tired of being virtually tongue tied? Give Mosh a chance!

I was talking with my InfoSmack co-conspirator, Greg Knieriemen (iknerd.com)  last week about virtual junk and how the word "virtualization" was so incredibly unwieldy. It was killing my lazy mouth to have to do so much work for such a well-understood term/topic.

(BONUS QUESTION: is "virtualization" a noun, verb, or WHAT? )

Fear no more, bad spellers and slothful speakers!  The new word for virtualization is MOSHWARE. MoshWare is software that enables all sorts of systems and applications to be blended, pureed, mashed and moshed together in a single computer, or MoshBox. It also allows MoshMachines (or MMs) to be relocated to other MoshBoxes using functions such as  m-Motion or TransMoshinization.

 Of course the word "MoshWare" could apply to many other things, including social networking sites, such as Twitter. There needs to be a modifying word or prefix for the social context in order to differentiate machine MoshWare (its true form) from social MoshWare.  Devo MoshWare works for me. 

Blade servers also provide Moshable benefits, similar to those of MoshWare, but in hardware. Whereas "Blade server" has 3 syllables, the much smaller word "BladeMosh" simply rolls off the tongue like a Scotsman's beverage. 

One of the great things about MoshWare is getting rid of unnecessary networking adapters by consolidating network traffic on fewer links over the MoshNet!  Not only that, but storage MoshNets can be implemented as Switchless SAMs (Storage Area MoshNets). To accomplish this, a MoshBox's HBAs are cabled directly to a storage array's ports without an intervening switch. When you consider that this eliminates two switches at at time (for HA) - as well as the need for zoning, the economic benefits can be significant. We have a number of customers at 3PAR who do just that and have saved a lot of money in the process. This means installing more SAN adapters in storage arrays, but if the arrays can accommodate them it might be worth considering. Is it for everybody - certainly not, but is is another option for reducing the cost of storage.

So what about Moshed storage - or STORMOSH!   SAN and NAS are different forms of StorMosh, but DAS is most certainly Moshless. The amount of Moshing a StorMosh does depends on it's design. Some StorMoshi require a large amount of Manual Moshing (ManMosh is an oxymoron to be sure), whereas other StorMoshi, such as those from 3PAR and Dell EqualLogic, Mosh at a very high level. 

The graphic below shows an implementation of a MoshStack ,with a MMs running inside MoshBoxes, connected to a StorMosh via a Switchless SAM.  

Comments

[Howard Marks]

Mark,

That makes my datacenter a MOSHpit right?

[marc farley]

Yes! Its another wear your body armour to work day.

[Steve Todd]

Data center gear is therefore moshpitable (like certain vendor blogs).

[marc farley]

And in agriculture, the application is agmoshtic.

[rbrambley]

Marc,

The term virtualization was moshed to v12n by @jtroyer a while ago. I've already proposed it be adopted as a standard mashtag for all tweeps.

http://vmetc.com/2009/04/20/proposal-for-a-virtualization-multi-purpose-twitter-hash-tag-v12n/.