Here is the second in my three part series on Virtualization and the cloud. Today’s entry focuses on the 800 pound gorilla in the virtualization space, VMware.
What VMware is seeing customers actually doing to take advantage of the cloud today both with regards to public and private clouds.
Some polling data he collected during his talk based on the ~300 folks who attended: 90-95% were virtualizing, 15% had an active private cloud project, 5-10% had a public cloud project. (This is pretty representative of what Dan’s generally seeing.)
The three phases of cloud:
Phase I: Standardizing and virtualizing an environment.
Phase II: Adopting private cloud from a management stand point: getting to self service and automation in terms of provisioning a new service/collapsing the time it takes to get a new image out to an end user or developer from weeks to minutes/ implementing charge back, dynamic capacity planning and management.
Phase III: Thinking about or planning how to leverage the public cloud in a fully compatible way.
A short history of VMware: how they’ve moved from desktop and server virtualization to VM management and optimization to enabling their platform for private clouds and public cloud providers.
Their “recent” acquisition of Spring Source and how it fits in.
Stay tuned next time for a summary of Gartner’s virtualization presentation from their data center conference.
Happy New Year to all! For the first week of this new year I’m going to focus on virtualization and the cloud.
Kicking off this mini-series is an interview I did last month at the Gartner DataCenter conference with David Greschler, director of virtualization strategy at Microsoft. I caught up with David right after his talk at the conference.
Some of the topics David tackles:
The ability to treat IT as a service. Before virtualization, specific workloads were tied to specific devices. Thanks to virtualization you can create pooled resources which is the beginning of IT as a service.
Microsoft’s Dynamic Data Center Toolkit: This tool overlays on top of HyperV and System Center (their management tool) and allows you to look at and manage your own datacenter as a pool of compute power. It is a step towards the private cloud and can also be used by hosters. It will also allow for moving workloads between public and private clouds.
Microsoft is focusing on giving you knowledge at the app level. System Center tells you whats going on inside not just at the hypervisor level.
Windows Azure: a large scale cloud that you can use to build apps for and have hosted on this environment.
The ability also to take workloads into Azure over time.
Image based Management: Taking the technology of the desktop-targeted App V and applying it to the server. Will allow you to encapsulate apps and move them from one OS to another without having to re-install them. You will no longer have 1000s and 1000s of virtualized images that you will have to manage and monitor, instead you will very few golden images of these VMs and you will be able to simply put these workloads in and take them out.
Last month at the Interop/Web 2.0 I was able to drag Citrix’s Roger Klorese away from booth duty for an interview. Roger is a Sr. Director at Citrix who works on Xen server and the Essentials product family. Here is what he had to say:
Some of the topics Roger tackles
What Roger has been focusing on this year — Free Xen server. Launching the offering (there have been 200K downloads this year)and then bringing more features into it. What comes with it for free and what are add-ons that you get thru the Essentials family.
In the networking space Citrix announced a version of their netscaler app delivery server as a virtual appliance.
Managing “OPVs” (other people’s VM’s)
What Roger is most excited about:
Growing the datacenter into the cloud – Xen.org recently released the Xen cloud platform which is a full cloud distro, with a management stack based on open sourcing the Xen server stack.
Early next year they are releasing the Xen client type 1, a bare metal client hypervisor.
A couple of weeks ago I was in New York to visit customers and attend the co-located Interop and Web 2.0 events. One of the attendees/participants I got to know there was Joe Weinman, VP of ATT’s Business Solutions. Joe has been focusing a lot on the cloud lately so I thought I’d put down for posterity his thoughts and explanation of what ATT is up to in this space.
Some of the topics that Joe tackles:
ATT’s evolving strategy involves mix of managed endpoints and a variety of network services as well as a variety of services in the cloud.
ATT’s services range from infrastructure services like “Synaptic hosting,” storage as a service and compute as a service thru a variety of SaaS apps like unified comms and collaboration, SAP, Oracle ebiz suite, Seybold and JD Edwards.
They have a large platform as a service offering that is used by tens of thousands developers creating at mobile enterprise apps.
They target a wide variety of endpoints e.g. iphones,windows mobile devices, netbooks, black berries all the way thru tele-presence rooms.
How ATT delivers on both front end and back end architectures.
Last but not least from the videos I took last month at Cloud Expo is the interview I conducted with Barry Lynn of 3tera. At a high level Barry positions his company as a software company that offers a turnkey cloud platform. See what else he has to say:
Some of the topics Barry Tackles
3tera sell’s their flagship product AppLogic three ways
License it to people who want to run private clouds behind their firewalls [competitors: VMware, people building it themselves]
License it to service providers who want to offer public cloud services but don’t want to build their own cloud (there are 30 SP’s worldwide offering clouds on the 3Tera platform) e.g. KDDI [competitors: people who build it themselves]
Virtual private data center business where people can lease a data center. They do this with DC partners [competitors: any service provider]
What they are doing with KDDI and their “KDDI cloud server” (hint: they are provisioning stacks e.g. ruby, .net, java…)
What’s coming up
Their App store is in beta and will be in production in Q1 of next year (ISVs publishing to the 3tera cloud).
Cloudware release: their orchestration and management layer will be offered separately next year and can be used on top of anyone’s virtualization, computing fabric or cloud engine.
A couple of weeks ago on the show floor of Cloud Computing Expo in Santa Clara I ran into Adam Hawley, Director of product management for Oracle VM. When Adam finished his stint in the Oracle booth he sat down with me to talk about what was going on at Oracle in the world of virtualization and the cloud.
Some of the topics Adam tackles:
Oracle VM, Oracle’s sever virtualization and management platform, while based on Xen is all Oracle on top of it.
The Virtual Iron acquisition which is in the process of being incorporated within the Oracle portfolio and is slated for release in 2010.
The Cloud as a higher level of automation on top of virtualization, compared to what traditional virtualization has provided.
Where Oracle will play in the cloud space (hint: think private).
The Oracle assembly builder that Adam was showing off at the show.
Given Larry’s views on cloud computing, is “cloud” a dirty word at Oracle?
Kicking off my series of videos from last week’s Cloud Expo in Santa Clara, here is a chat I had with Oren Teich, of Heroku. Heroku, if you’re not familiar is a 2-yr old Platform as-a-Service company targeting Ruby developers. Oren recently joined Heroku as their head of product management and had the following to say:
Some of the topics Oren tackles:
Where the name “Heroku” comes from and why they were going for a Japanese sounding name.
Why did they choose Ruby and why did they go with a cloud-based plaform?
How Heroku is similar/different from Google App Engine and Engine Yard.
The majority of the folks who have created the 39,000+ apps on the site are hobbists. That being said, the folks who pay their bills are those who are creating social media apps for platforms like Facebook, Twitter and the iPhone.
How Heroku makes their money: they charge as you scale and they charge for add-ons.
What they plan to concentrate on in the year ahead
Jimmy Pike is the director of systems architecture for the Data Center Solutions group here at Dell and self-proclaimed “head geek.” Using a tool case with its insides stripped out, part of an old inbox and a bunch of off the shelf components he has created the world’s first portable “data center.” (All for the princely sum of ~$2,000)
This former toolkit now holds:
Two dual-socket servers featuring 2.5GHz Intel processors
One server running Windows ‘03 acting as the DHCP and domain server and the other running Red Hat linux.
Last but not least in my series of video’s from last month’s Cloud World/Open Source World I present to you Ken Oestreich, VP of Product marketing at Egenera. I grabbed some time with Ken to learn about Engenera, the cloud and how they’re working with Dell.
Some of the topics that Ken tackles:
While a hypervisor abstracts software, Egenera’s PAN manager abstracts the “plumbing” e.g. NIC cards, switches, host bus adaptor cards etc.
PAN manager allows you to consolidate networks, fail-over entire machines and, in the case of disaster recovery, recover and reproduce entire compute environments.
Egenera is working with Dell in the form of the Dell PAN system to provide agility in your infrastructure.
This Infrastructure as a Service system can be used inside or outside your firewall.
What developments Ken is most excited about in the upcoming year.
I’m getting down to the end of the videos I recorded last month at Cloud World/Open Source World and I’ve saved some of the best for last. My penultimate interview is with Michael Crandell, CEO of Right Scale.
Right Scale, based in sunny Santa Barbara California, makes a cloud management platform that provides greater control over the cloud and makes it easy for companies to begin to migrate applications to the cloud or start building new ones there. See what Michael has to say…
Some of the stuff Michael discusses:
Right Scale focuses on three things: 1) Automation, 2) Providing a library of cloud ready solutions, 3) doing all this in an open and transparent way that allows portability among cloud platforms.
How Right Scale came to be. Their founder was teaching a class at UCSB about how to build an ecommerce site. Amazon granted him some free compute time to use in his class. He realized he needed a framework for managing and monitoring the classes usage, he also realized there was a business to built around this idea…
Where Right Scale will be putting its efforts in the up coming year:
Supporting more cloud platforms as the come online
Increasing their partner program and their cloud-ready solutions
Increasing support for enterprise level editions and features e.g. security and compliance, user control, billing, metering…
The CEO and founder of GoGrid, John Keagy, made an interesting assertion at Cloud World/Open Source World: over the next decade, the IT economy will shrink from $1.5 trillion to $500 billion. I thought this was an interesting statement so I followed up with him after his talk and we sat down for a quick interview:
Some of the things John talks about:
GoGrid plays in the Infrastructure on demand space and has been doing so since 2002.
They work with partners in the layers above infrastructure and don’t have plans to venture north.
The IT economy shrinkage will be driven by automation and reduced capex (commodity hardware is a big component of this)
Right now its hardly a competitive market in the IaaS space (“its GoGrid and a bookstore”) so you can expect to see prices drop as the competition heats up.
If you’re not doing your test and development and QA in the cloud, your not engaging in best practices.
Reductive Labs, the company behind Puppet, recently received $2 million in funding. Puppet, a framework for automating system administration across the network at scale, allows an admin to build and configure a passel of servers in a period of hours rather than months.
Earlier this month at Cloud World/Open Source World I sat down with Luke Kanies of Reductive Labs to learn more about Puppet, who uses it and what they plan to do with all that money.
Some of the stuff Luke talks about:
In the cloud you can turn on 100s or 1000s of servers at the click of a mouse, but what happens when you want to configure them?
Users include Red Hat, Sun, Dell, Rackspace and Google. Google manages their entire corporate infrastructure with Puppet.
No GUI for you! Puppet has its own simple language that you use to program your infrastructure and then Puppet runs it across your entire infrastructure. The language is based on Perl + Ruby + Nagios.
A good portion on the $2 million will be spent on building some GUI tools (along with a little sales and marketing)
Puppet is 100% open source and based on Ruby. There are no commercial features (yet).
Puppet has a pretty vibrant community: 1,200 – 1,400 on the user list along with what could be the largest system focused IRC channel.
At Cloud World/Open Source World earlier this month I grabbed some time with Forrester’s “Mr. Cloud” James Staten. I wanted to get his take on Cloud Computing and what was hot and what is not. Here is the result.
Some of the things James talks about:
How the conversation about cloud has changed over the last year.
He spends a lot of time telling people what the cloud is not.
The three things they’ve learned (coming soon to Forrester report near you):
First thing to do in the cloud is test and development
Organizations can take short term web promotions and marketing efforts and drop them into the cloud (witness Wendy’s 99c promotion)
Put apps that are triggered by revenue into the cloud
Rather that “Public vs Private” clouds, Forrester segments it into “internal vs. hosted vs. public
Cloud is not an all or nothing proposition, it’s another tool in the toolkit.
I first met Chander Kant, CEO of open source cloud back provider Zmanda, last year at the MySQL conference. At that time we did an audio interview. Just like Jonathan, this time around I caught him on “film.”
Earlier this month at Cloud World/Open World I bumped into Jonathan Bryce one of the two founders of the cloud platform formerly known as “Mosso” (now known as Rackspace Cloud).
Last year when I interviewed Jonathan, I did an audio podcast. This time around I was armed with my Flip Mino and caught it all on video for the little(r) screen.
Some of the topics Jonathan addresses:
When Rackspace funded employees Jonathan and Todd to go off and start their cloud venture 4 years ago, why didn’t they brand it “Rackspace?”
Why did they recently decide to roll Mosso back into the mothership and rebrand it?
The progression of in-house -> colocation -> managed hosting -> cloud.
The three pieces of Rackspace Cloud: Cloud Servers & Cloud Files (infrastructure as a service) and Cloud Sites (platform as a service with the option of using either the LAMP or .NET stack).
Which offering is getting the most traction.
Why their customer Fresh Books went with Cloud Files.
James Urquhart of Cisco and author of “The Wisdom of Clouds” blog on Cnet, gave a talk last week at Cloud World entitled, “Virtualization to Cloud.” I wanted to capture some of the topics he talked about and learn a bit more so I grabbed him for a podcast after he got off stage. Here is the result…
Some of the topics James tackles:
Whereas four months ago the question was ”What is cloud” the conversation has recently shifted to “how can I replicate some of the success stories that I’ve heard about?”
One effect of the cloud is that has greatly lowered the VC capital that start-ups require to get set up and going.
Internal IT needs to realize they are no longer delivering a product but are delivering a service. To be of value to the business they don’t have to wire servers, they can help them through the process of getting the right compute power for each app.
Regulatory and industry standards will be what dicates the speed of the evolution of the cloud, not technology.
On the first day of Open Source World/Cloud World/Etc World I attended Brian Aker’s talk entitled “Drizzle, Rethinking MySQL for the Web.” For those not in the know, Drizzle is a reworking of the MySQL database to slim it down and make it more appropriate for web-infrastructure and cloud computing . I caught up with Brian after his talk to learn a little bit more about Drizzle, where its come from and where its going.
Some of the topics that Brian tackles:
Looking at what customer needs were not being addressed by MySQL.
Stripping stuff out of MySQL and setting up Drizzle as a microkernel design that modules can be added to.
One of the main goals was to allow greater community involvement in the development (currently Sun folks only make up 6-7% of those making contributions).
Is Drizzle production ready?
What cloud bits have been contributed to the project?
A little over two weeks ago the latest Blueprint update, the Spring ‘09 release, was loosed upon the world. We took the opportunity of the launch, which included launches for our other products and services, to overhaul our web pages. In the specific case of Blueprint we created new pages for Overview, Features, Resources and Success Stories.
You gotta see it to believe it
For the top of the Overview and Features pages we created the following video that presents a 3 minute and 18 second overview of Blueprint. (I recommend you click the full screen button so you can see the details). Check it out and let me know what you think
Last year I did a podcast with Mosso (“The Rackspace Cloud”) co-founder Jonathan Bryce. Last Saturday at Cloud Camp Austin I caught up with the other co-counder of Mosso, Todd Morey to get his side of the story.
Some of the topics Todd tackles:
How Todd and Jonathan formed a good partnership, Todd on UI and design and Jonathan on the development side.
Starting Mosso out of a desire to have place where they could run their code without having to worry about the infrastructure.
Mosso’s integration back into Rackspace
Will Mosso bring some of its hipness to Rackspace? (editorial note: looking at the Rackspace’s site it looks like Mosso has already influenced it for the better)
At Austin Cloud Camp on Saturday I ran into Ubuntu linux developer and Canonical employee, Dustin Kirkland. Dustin is on the server developer team at Canonical and, as he explains it, focuses on various aspects of virtualization, the plumbing layer below cloud computing. I grabbed Dustin for a few minutes and chatted with him about last week’s release and what he’s been working on.
Posted by Barton George 
