Big day at VMworld today. Not only did VMware spell out their vision of enterprise cloud computing, but Paul Maritz went into considerable detail during his keynote -- more from Steve Herrod tomorrow.
Watching the twitterfeed and the blogosphere, it's almost like a thunderclap went off.
And maybe it did ...
You Probably Know Where I'm Coming From ...
I think I've written enough about the private cloud concept already. Sorry if I've bored you to tears, but many of us believe this is a pretty big concept that's not going to go away.
A list of prior posts from yours truly appears here.
Why do I think this is such a big thing? Because of all the different cloud models I've heard debated and discussed over the last few years, this is the first one that I think can work for real-world enterprise IT. It makes sense to me.
And the magic sauce is a relatively new term -- the virtual data center operating system, or VDC-OS.
Make no mistake, this isn't just about hypervisors, or virtual desktops -- it's about creating an end-to-end abstraction that starts at any user device, runs through the data center, and will federate an open market of service provider resources as well.
Ideally, this is what all hypervisor technology should aspire to. All congratulations to Paul Maritz and the VMware team for spotting the big picture first, as well as being the strongest contender to make it real first.
For those of you who insist on continually debating pros and cons of various hypervisors, I would respectfully offer that the frame of reference has shifted.
As far as such big visions go, it doesn't seem that far away to me. Take what's already visible today, peek into a bit of VMware's roadmap, add some good ecosystem partners, and -- yup -- it all could happen sooner than the cynics expect.
We're not asking people to rewrite their applications to a new stack. We're not asking them to decide the mix of internal and external resources. We're not asking people to give up control of their environments.
No, all that this vision is really asking is to keep doing what you're doing (aggressively virtualizing applications and information) and keep the eyes focused on a slightly bigger picture.
Powerful Imagery
Paul uses some powerful terms in his keynote -- worth watching in its entirety (note: Paul comes on at about 10 minutes in).
Terms like "software mainframe for the 21st century". That particualr term I think is going to generate some very useful discussion from multiple quarters.
Or "self-service IT". A powerful, visionary concept that's also going to generate some great discussion as well.
For Every Force, There Is A Reaction
There were hundreds of postings today that I saw, with a few good writeups, and probably more to follow. I found Chris Mellor's reaction useful, as well as Rob Enderle's. Inevitably, there's more to come, right?
So, what should we expect to see in the near future?
First, we'll probably here from the other hypervisor vendors in short order. This sort of bold and encompassing vision can't go unanswered for too long, can it?
Second, it'll be interested to see where the traditional datacenter vendors line up: IBM, HP et. al. They've been pushing VMware for awhile -- yet I'm not quite sure they see the future of enterprise IT in quite the same way. And I can't wait to hear from Cisco :-)
Finally, the most interest jockeying will occur amongst the existing cloud vendors: Amazon and others. Do they upscale their vision, or keep focused where they're strong?
What Say You?
If you think about it, the future state of enterprise IT is being hotly debated around new concepts right now.
Where do you stand on all of this?
A colleague at Hitachi Data Systems steered me here and I just wanted to say I couldn't agree more with: "all that this vision is really asking is to keep doing what you're doing (aggressively virtualizing applications and information) and keep the eyes focused on a slightly bigger picture."
It's been my contention that IT organizations are moving to private clouds whether that is their intended goal or not. They have been deploying virtualized servers and virtualized storage trying to get more granular in scalability and more adaptable to changing workloads, making it all highly available, and so forth.
Cloud isn't so much a new technology, but a way of describing the benefits that come from the proper application of information technology. Not to say that there nothing new to Clouds, but that the fundamentals of Cloud are already in most datacenters today, making the adoption of Cloud a lot less painful and costly than many may think.
A question: One of the things I try to explain to the private cloud naysayers is, if the cost model of Cloud is such that it: enables sufficient margins, is secure enough, available enough and so on, for service providers to exist, it must provide similar benefits to private IT organizations. Am I off-base here, or do you believe that this is a reasonable argument?
Posted by: Jeff Lundberg | February 24, 2009 at 10:12 PM
Private Clouds? Psssshhhhhaaaaa. What a lousy idea.
...written prior to the video of Mr. Maritz's keynote:
http://tinyurl.com/cntnen
Lucky guess. ;p
Posted by: Christofer Hoff | February 24, 2009 at 10:42 PM
Like you, Chuck, I'm convinced that private clouds are a realistic step on the cloud computing path (including the path toward hybrid public/private clouds). But virtualization doesn't necessarily equal cloud computing. Good comments in Hoff's blog about this topic. More discussion on this (including links to the Hoff blog discussion) and the VMware announcements here: http://datacenterdialog.blogspot.com/2009/02/sorry-vmware-you-dont-need.html
Posted by: Jay Fry | February 25, 2009 at 03:03 PM
Hi Jay -- I think I agree with you.
What's intriguing about this scenario (at least to me) is that virtualization lays the foundation for cloud computing -- by creating containerized app/inf VMs that don't know or care about the infrastructure they might be running, where that might be, etc.
For all those legacy enterprise IT people (you know who you are!) I think this will be an appealing on-ramp to the cloud.
Although certainly not the only one!
-- Chuck
Posted by: Chuck Hollis | February 25, 2009 at 03:10 PM