Healthcare Reform Should Launch Our Next Global “Space Race”

I wasn’t even born until 11 years afterwards, but I grew up fully aware of the launch of Sputnik I in 1957, the dog “Laika” sent up by the USSR the next year, and the whole “space race” between the Americans and the Russians. Those historical moments gave us a global–even galactic–perspective and a global competition for innovation. Yes, for many people, it was tinged with an element of fear and potential military catastrophe. But for me as a child through to this very day, it captured my imagination and felt like a collective sense of purpose for where America should be headed. It was that generation’s manifest destiny to own the skies, and it generated enormous advances in other fields and industries as a side effect of focusing on those grand challenges.

As we are bogged down in this healthcare reform debate (and for those of you who missed the intended parody of my last blog post, I want to assure you that, while tired of the silly headlines and partisan posturing, I am okay and that it was meant entirely as a humorous critique of our healthcare paradigm!), it occurs to me that the President and Congress have missed an enormous opportunity to show how healthcare reform–what we really ought to call “healthcare innovation” instead–could and should be the context for the equivalent of our next global space race. 

We should be taking a global, competitive perspective towards healthcare reform, realizing that some country is going to develop new infrastructure and industries to deliver care in fundamentally new ways for our swiftly aging planet. Some nation will see this global age wave not only as an economic threat but as an opportunity to generate new technologies, services, and jobs to deliver personal healthcare. Back in the year 2000, there were 600 million people over the age of 60 on our planet. By 2025, in just fifteen more years, the World Health Organization says there will be 1.2 billion…with more than 2 billion by the mid century point. This demographic horizon is where we should be aiming. The United States ought to be at the forefront of innovation to meet the needs of this global age wave.

How do we pay for the uninsured and our voracious healthcare appetite in America? One answer would be to become a global leader of delivering new healthcare services and technologies not only here at home but also to many other parts of the world. Someone is going to use the advances of the Internet, genetic testing, personalized medicine, home diagnostics, health coaching and disease management software, and social networking sites to deliver care differently. Some country is going to tap into the “Boomer Phenomena” to foster and ride a cultural movement of consumer empowerment, self-care, personal responsibility, and patient proactivity with new services that allow people to pilot their own bodies and healthcare experiences from their own homes, laptops, cell phones, and personal health records. The question is: are we in the United States prepared to compete in this global race to deliver personal health care to the planet?

I get to spend some time in Europe when visiting our Technology Research for Independent Living, or TRIL Centre, in Dublin, Ireland (check out www.trilcentre.org). My friends and colleagues there tell me that the European Union is investing with clear intent to develop a 21st century healthcare services infrastructure for themselves (they are ahead of us on the age wave curve so already need advances in aging-in-place and disease management technologies) and for other countries. They have invested more than one billion Euros in independent living technology research. They have made home and community based care an international priority. They are exploring the trans-national licensure of doctors and nurses who could then deliver care to their patients virtually or in locations across Europe. They are in the early stages of training and credentialing new kinds of home care and other “care concierge” workers. They are investing in broadband and other computing infrastructure to the home–even in rural areas–to help people be “e-citizens,” which very much includes getting health care at home. So perhaps the United States is already well behind in the “space race” to innovate for global aging?

As the President addresses Congress and the nation next week on healthcare reform, I hope he brings his innovation message forward.  He has reinvested in science and technology research and education. He has hired the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer. He has invested in health information technologies and electronic health records as infrastructure for healthcare reform. He has shown how innovation to meet the needs of Global Warming can generate new jobs and industries across America. Now he needs to show how the same results can come from a focus on Global Aging.

Mr. President, let Wednesday’s speech be your call for a Sputnik launch for healthcare reform…start the next space race…throw down the innovation gauntlet to the American people to make healthcare reform not only a means of healing our sick care system but also a means of generating new jobs, new kinds of healthcare jobs, new technologies, and new services for providing care which could extend globally. Show the American people and the rest of the world that healthcare innovation–for a global marketplace–can be a stimulus to our economy. Let us begin the race that others have already started. It is our generation’s challenge to own the future of healthcare–the largest segment of the economy in almost every nation on the planet. Healthcare reform and policies in Washington D.C. should focus on helping us to compete fairly, vigorously, and internationally…and to win.

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VMworld 2009 ¡V Day 2, keynote by Steve Herrod

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Welcome to the liveblogging of the VMworld 2009 keynote, day 2.

Today’s keynote is expected to bring us a bit more technical content than yesterday. The main speaker is Dr. Stephen Herrod, VMware CTO and one of the original developers of SimOS while at Stanford. VMware engineers are expected to be joining Herrod on stage to demonstrate upcoming features and products.

Note: this is a rush transcript. Check back later for analysis.

Ready for the VMworld 2009 keynote by VMware CTO Stephen Herrod. Follow http://is.gd/2NRsk for the play-by-play.
The keynote is starting..
“Steve Herrod takes the stage. “”This is probably my favourite hour of the year.””
Focus today will be on the desktop, PCoIP, .. View is about enabling a new sort of desktop concept. User-centric rather then device centric.
+1M virtual desktops out there.
Lots of development in vSphere was geared towards hosting desktops. Tuned for Vista and Win 7 workloads.
Intel Nehalem / Xeon 5500 allows up to twice the amount of desktops per cores.
New evolutions on storage level as well. SSD disks allow much better user experiences.
The goal is to provide best user experience to all endpoints: thin, thick clients, over WAN, LAN, …
The best experience is still the local, rich, portable desktop. The same image that’s used on other endpoints can be checked in and out.
Offline replication of desktops so to speak.
PCoIP, purpose built for desktop virtualization. Development with Terradici. Coming later this year.
Vendors can create hardware accellerated clients for even better experience.
“New concept “”in this economy””: employee owned IT. Provide user with a certain budget, let them choose the hardware (Mac/PC/..) and host the”
corporate desktop through Fusion/Workstation/Player/…
For corporate-owned IT: bare-metal virtualization. Co-development with Intel. Laptop/deskop hypervisor.
Single hardware-agnostic desktop build can run on any type of x86 device.
“VMware View Demo on stage. “”A day in the life of a VMware View user.””
Windows 7 running on laptop. Showing device manager. The rich environment is running on a virtual SVGA gpu -> type 1 hypervisor.
Next demo: thin client with smooth graphics. Demo with Google Earth.
“Opening the same VM on his “”beige box”” desktop. Next: Demo with WYSE pocket client on iPhone to access the same VM.”
Next: VMware Mobile strategy. Not only use the phone as a thin client, but put a hypervisor on the phone as well.
Phones become mobile pc’s, bring along the traditional pc challenges. (security, access control, data leakage protection, ..)
Creating corporate mobile vm’s allows the same device freedom desktop virtualization allows.
Lots of app stores coming up, tied to specific types of devices, even though they’ve got the same base platform.
(As if Apple is ever going to approve a hypervisor app that can run arbitrary code…)
Peter Ciurea, Global Head of Product Development at Visa comes on stage.
Demo with development ARM-based phone. Hypervisor + Windows CE on top.
Visa app demo with alerts (every time a Visa card is swiped, the device alerts you), offers (mobile coupons, ..) and location based offers.
The Visa app was developed for Android. Android is running next to Windows CE. The OS has access to the gps functions, has smooth graphics.
Moving back to ‘big iron’. vSphere enables the software mainframe. Up to 32TB of RAM.
If you were born before ‘75 you’d call this a mainframe. If you were born after, you’d call it the Cloud. Let’s call it a giant computer.
VMotion is the foundation of this giant computer.
“This is about the 6th anniversary of the first VMotion demo. Music: “”I like to move it”” from Madagascar. You’ll never VMotion again without”
thinking about that song.
VMotion was around when Friends was still doing new episodes. The first VMworld was 10 months away. Loooong time ago.
Probably about 359 million VMotions to date. People use VMotion constantly. Saves time, money and marriages http://twitpic.com/g7dii
VMotion breadth continues to grow. Storage VMotion, Network VMotion (distributed switch) and long distance VMotion.
Focus of vSphere: support all major applications (SAP, Oracle, SQL, …). Even HPC workloads are moving to virtualization.
vSphere allows better-than-physical scalability.
DRS allows higher peak capacity. Achieves 96% efficiency of ideally placed VMs. Extending DRS to include I/O.
“DPM: VMotion for global power optimization. (””Constantly defragging the datacenter””)”
Automating the datacenter through VMware AppSpeed allows better application performance guarantees.
Built into vSphere: vApp. Built on OVF. Create collections of self-wiring VMs and add SLA metadata.
Control security and compliance via VMsafe APIs. Virtualization lets you look into VMs and check every instruction.
Always-on security, users can not turn agents off.
Last thing: manage configuration integrity at scale. vCenter ConfigControl
First public demo on stage of ConfigControl. Dashboard to monitor and manage changes in IT environments.
Scenario: help desk ticket, Exchange server is down. ConfigControl sent alert that network policy was changed. Helps debug system problems.
ConfigControl interface is web-based.
ConfigControl will ship in 2010 H1.
A bit more detail of the VMworld datacenter. Running 37,248 VMs. From 25 Megawatts to 540 Kilowatts of power usage. 778 physical servers.
“For the geeks out there who didn’t know it: vSphere can host vSphere. The labs run nested ESX “”Virtual Virtual datacenters””.”
Next chapter: cloud cloud cloud.
Work being done around network connectivity between clouds, transparent storage migration, easy management and policy-enforcement.
Connectivity example: work started in Site Recovery Manager.
Policies are exchanged between multiple datacenters. IP address management is automated through vCenter.
Cisco enables long distance VMotion through Data Center Interconnect.
Datacenter extension up to 200km.
F5: BIG-IP Global Traffic manager enable slong distance VMotion.
Moving on to vCloud API to provide programmatic access to resources. Enables self-service portals, vCenter client plugins (manage VMs in
3rd party datacenters), and ISV integrations: 3rd party management, SaaS deployments, ..
vCloud API was submitted to DMTF for industry certification.
End goal: differentiated cloud offerings. (Demo cloud, High end SLA, green cloud, high performance, …)
Fourth pillar (next to View, vSphere, vCloud): vApps. Auto-pilot applications. Reason for SpringSource applications.
Automating the application development space will bring down maintenance and deployment costs.
Virtualizing hardware simplifies deployment. VMware wants to simplify development through application frameworks that work together with VMs
Virtualization-aware platform can create self-healing and self-scaling applications, that interact with hypervisor to manage hardware
building bocks.
Goal is to interface with not only Java frameworks, but also with RoR, Django, .net, PHP, …
Adrian Colyer, SpringSource CTO on stage.
Another try to explain what this all does to an audience of mainly server infrastructure folks.
And that finishes the keynote…
Thanks for following. Check back later for more news and analysis.

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Red Hat Included in S&P 500 Index

URL: http://press.redhat.com/2009/07/27/red-hat-included-in-sampp-500-index/