Chuck's Blog

Why I Really Like VMware's SpringSource Acquisition

Sorry I wasn't able to weigh in when this happened last week. 

The good news: the more I think about it, the more I find this particular acquisition absolutely fascinating.

The usual disclaimer: I'm offering my own opinions, and not speaking officially on behalf of VMware, EMC, SpringSource or any other company for that matter.

But, despite the disclaimer, many of us think this is pretty darn cool.

Big VDI With VMware / Cisco / EMC

Came across this gem the other day, and wanted to share. 

Ideally, this would be over at Chad's blog, but I guess he's been swamped with prep for VMworld.

In a nutshell, it's a beefy whitepaper showing Cisco's UCS doing virtual desktop consolidation in an entirely new league.

A couple of highlights:

• This scenario targets heavy-duty knowledge worker use profiles as opposed to occasional desktop users.  Although virtual desktops can potentially apply everywhere, they have special appeal for the power users in some organizations, hence the use of industrial-strength infrastructure for this particular environment.

• This scenario validates the premise that certain VMware consolidation scenarios are memory-limited (vs. CPU or I/O bandwidth), hence the attractiveness of the UCS design.

• As you dig into the white paper, you'll get a sense of the attractiveness of how the UCS Manager's template-based approach complements VMware's and EMC's.

I think this is yet another great example of the power of VCE: VMware, Cisco and EMC working together to accelerate fully virtualized environments and private clouds.  Thanks to the respective teams who did all the hard work!

More to come.

Storage And Cloud

One of the more popular questions that gets directed at me by journalists and others these days is around the above topic.

I guess since EMC does storage -- and is very active in things cloud-like -- they expect us to have some nice sound bites.

Well, I have my pre-packaged answer that's suitable for the press, but -- if you have the time and the interest -- the deeper answer is much more engaging.

The Three Faces Of Cloud

Going out to the GigaOm Structure09 cloud event gave me an opportunity to reflect on "what is cloud" and, more importantly "what is not cloud".

While many of the discussions were interesting, I did feel that there were way too many contrived arguments needed to support thinly-veiled product pitches.

At the event, a journalist I know stopped me, and begged me for a very short, understandable description of what this cloud stuff was all about so she could better understand what everyone was talking about.

Needless to say, I was very sympathetic.

I did my best to oversimplify -- let me know how I did?

Getting Comfortable With Oversubscription

It's a key concept in getting any sort of shared resource efficiency.  We see it everywhere we look in our daily lives.

But as we talk about IT strategies, private cloud and fully virtualized environments, one of the biggest stumbling blocks I'm encountering is the idea of intentionally pushing oversubscription of IT infrastructure resources -- servers and storage.

And that's going to have to change, I think.

Business Continuity -- Virtualization Changes Everything

I haven't looped back to this thought in quite a while, but felt motivated to do so by this recent press release announcing EMC's business continuity professional services for virtualized environments.

Once again, it's another example of virtualization changing everything, including how we think about protecting against the unthinkable.

Barriers To Private Cloud Adoption

I've must have had the private cloud discussion well over a hundred times with customers.

Begin to fully virtualize your environment

Learn to manage it more like a cloud, and less like a data center from 1989.

Start to consider the strategic implications of the new choices you now have -- everything from dynamic federation of resources to a bring-your-own-laptop program.

Mostly, it's gone pretty well.  Far better, in fact, than any other discussion I've had with customers -- ever.

And I'm starting to see more and more consistency regarding the structural barriers to private cloud adoption by enterprise IT groups.

Private Clouds and Portable User Experiences

When talking about private clouds, there's just so many interesting angles to dig into -- it ties so many different themes in IT into a consistent story that I keep getting drawn in like a moth to a flame.

Fortunately, I'm not the only one -- all of the customers I talk to are starting to get the buzz as well.  At some future point, I'll share my reasons why I think this is the case, but -- for now -- I'd like to discuss the user experience part of this discussion.

This post was triggered by a VMware news item describing how health care professionals can use VMware View to create a "follow me" user experience across thin clients, laptops, desktops, tablets -- just about any reasonable user device.

IT gets to package up a user experience, push it to multiple devices, and manage it all centrally.

Talk about your win-win scenario!

Press and Analysts React To Private Cloud

I've worked with the press and analyst community for many years. 

Say what you will, but I've found them a very good barometer of what ideas will fly, and which ones won't. 

Sure, they don't actually buy IT products.  But they do get exposed to just about every IT pitch in the world, and they usually have a good nose for what's going to be a popular discussion, and what won't.

I've now had a few outings where I've had an opportunity to share private cloud concepts with these folks -- and how VMware, Cisco and EMC are working together to accelerate this vision.

The reactions have been mostly favorable, but with a few interesting wrinkles here and there.

Oracle Wins Virtual Iron, Customers Lose

Sometimes you see things in this industry that make you shake your head and wonder.

Such is the situation with Oracle's recent acquisition of Virtual Iron. 

Put in the context of other recent activities, the picture is crystal clear: it appears that Oracle intends to use their market power with databases to force customers to consider their soon-to-be-announced virtualization stack.

And, from a customer perspective, this will not be a good thing.