When I first heard about the XenSource acquisition, I instantly thought it was spelled with a ‘Z’ instead of an ‘X’. The names are pronounced exactly the same.
I found an interesting XenSource presentation tonight. It is from a couple of years ago but the points are still strong and valid.
I was just dying to have a post titled with the words Zen and Xen. It appears that other writers thought the same thing as there are at least two other blog posts with this play on words.
There is one more thing I will add to this wordplay. Zen is in interesting “religion” that does not believe in ceremony and written texts. Zen is a branch of Buddhism that believes strongly in the need to reach enlightenment from searching from within. This is achieved through meditation and mindful acceptance. The goal is to find enlightenment to bring out the essence of true self. The document at Wikipedia is much more interesting and accurate that what I protray here.
Using the concept of Zen in a data center is definitely push the intent of Zen. However, it does still apply. The thinking would state that you are trying to find the most optimal and balanced use of your data center for the sake of running your business. XenSource have seen the vision of a truly balanced data center and see that true realization can only come from more insightful software models built on the base hardware. This implies that people at XenSource are aware enough to realize how much power this kind of thinking has.
The ultimate goal is enlightenment and this means that the data center does exactly as it is meant to do when it is meant to do it. You can see that virtualization is only part of this story and that having a truly autonomous data center that is running at perfect capacity is still a work in progress.
Strange to have ideas from around 600AD be so strong in the twenty first century. If I was to commit to a more radical way to express this, I would say that the twenty first century is in need of enlightenment to create more balance and the correct purpose for all things.
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