I was quite fortunate to be invited to a private press/analyst cloud event with Paul M. There was just some 50-100 people in the main auditorium. We were told we’re not allowed to live blogging, because there was a press release due directly after the event itself.

Paul M began by outlining the VMware vCloud initiative – where VMware intends to partner with a number of partners such as AT&T and so on. The vCloud initiative was announced about year ago, and in that time more than 1000 service providers have signed up to the program. The emphasis was about choice, and not locking customers into a particular cloud provider.

There’s a raft announcment of various providers launching vCloud services based on vSphere4:

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/154601,exclusive-vmware-and-melbourne-it-launch-cloud-service.aspx

http://www.savvis.com/en-US/Services/Hosting/Managed_Compute/Pages/ProjectSpirit.aspx

http://www.von.com/news/verizon-business-launches-cloud-caas.html

http://vcloudexpress.terremark.com/

So get ready for a war between cloud providers – each saying they have better availability, security and so on than their competitors.

Steve Caniano of AT&T, came on stage to tell us about what they are providing. He explained what peoples main worries/concerns are about moving to the cloud including – security and performance SLAs… He outlined how they have been working with EMC’s ATMOS systems to produce a storage-as-a-service system creating a “virtual-private storage cloud”. Erm, basically you access the storage via a VPN connection… To be honest it was hard to see past the PR/Marketing speak like “virtual private storage cloud”

Dino Cicciarelli (VMW, inc) gave us a demo of “Workload Federation”. This was a demo of moving a VM (a workload) from one cloud (datacenter) to another. Essentially, were talking about VMotion from datacenters to datacenters. They set of a ping, and put a workload with a SQL box – and then proceeded to move it between to different ESX hosts in a different datacenters.

Next up was a guy from Savvis showcasing their Project Spirit cloud – he really flagged up his companies drag & drop method for offering different levels of redudency and service levels. It was very much like the AT&T demo earlier. They keep on telling me how important SLA and Security is – without telling me how they achieve that…

Next we had Verizon who launched a new update to their CAAS platform. His emphais was on data protection and data security.

So I began to see a pattern – basically this event – is about getting big companies to come along and endorse VMware’s cloud view of the world. They also lining up to endorse vSphere4 as the underlying platform for their clouds – indirect competition with Amazons EC2 which of course is NOT based on VMware technologies. The other thing they want to flag up was how developers are now beginning to use these environments for creating applications. So that was an excuse to bring up Rod Johnson of SpringSource (remember how they were talking to MS, well they were bought by VMware!). Of course, Johnson’s comments in that previous URL have now been quietly forgotten. Remember he said in July this year:

“I think Spring developers should definitely be able to interoperate with Microsoft technologies, and I think there’s a bunch of stuff that they’re doing in Azure that may be of interest to our community.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 at 12:16 am and is filed under vSphere. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.