Mixpanel makes an app that tracks your website’s use in some detail; it’s a tool for site operators and e-commerce types. It left Rackspace for a few significant reasons, one of which was the Elastic Block Store (EBS) feature of AWS, the ephemeral storage system linked to your virtual machines; another was the lack of a fully developed API for Rackspace. Big deal, Rackspace makes hay over customer wins, too.

What this highlights is the difference in the two offerings — Rackspace Cloud is much closer to traditional hosting, both in concept and design, than AWS. Go to the site, click on a button, get a server/website/whatever. You also have to deal with humans after a certain size, submitting a request to increase resources here and there.

AWS is a completely hands-off, completely blinded set of resources and rules that have much less to do with the way standard hosting operates; it’s fundamentally different even if the end result (you get a server) is the same.

Mixpanel wants (apparently) a generally new but now well-established concept; they want Web stuff and they want it all the time and everywhere. They mention Amazon’s superlative CDN, the range of instance sizes and so on, but it’s really the fact that you’re not actually dealing with infrastructure, except in the loosest concept, that’s pulling them over.

Storage and CPU and bandwidth are logically connected, but so loosely that you can’t really say it’s mimicking the operation of a physical facility. It’s just buckets of ability you buy, like power-ups in a video game or something. This is ideal for a Web application, since that’s how users are looking at the application, too. Maybe not so much for someone running a different kind of application. Encoding.com, for instance, chose Rackspace because their video encoding service needed Rackspace’s superior internal connectivity and CPU, not application flexibility.

Anyway, the fun part starts in the comment section of the blog, where users come on to gripe about AWS in almost the same way Mixpanel is griping about Rackspace; one developer said he was mysteriously slapped with charges over bandwidth that could possibly have occurred and is not unwilling to turn his test instance back on, since AWS simply refuses to address the issue. Sounds like some place where they put a premium on customer support might be a better fit — you know, where they have “fanatical support”…

It’s impressive; lots of new, gleaming white PVC and galvanized steel tubing. The facility has the ability to shutdown its chillers in the winter and get free cooling when it’s below 45 degrees outside, thanks to modern plate and frame heat exchangers (they are bright blue, probably to set off the red water pumps that connect to the PVC chiller pipes. Red, white and blue!). Solar panels can provide about 75Kw, they have a handful of megawatts worth of generators, etc, and everything is shipshape and shiny.

On the floor (36″ raised) we saw customer cages and racks for AT&T’s co-location business, the massive switching and internet hub (four 10 GB pipes to the local backbone) and we saw the AT&T managed services infrastructure, a good dozen aisles of rack space, mostly full, with alternating hot/cold aisles with about a 20 degree difference between them.

This is where AT&T puts its virtualization, hosting, application services, managed services and yes, its Synaptic cloud services for the local area. Currently, AT&T offers Synaptic Storage as an on-demand, pay-as-you-go cloud service, and Synaptic Compute is live as a “controlled launch” with a limited number of users. Currently, AT&T Business Services says that cloud is its second heaviest investment area after mobile services.

AT&T currently runs all of its production services that are virtualized on VMware, but it plans to roll out additional hypervisor support very quickly. It is also pitching its “virtual private cloud” as an area of first interest to customers. AT&T has the ability, like Verizon, to offer truly dedicated cloud environments that do not have to be exposed to standard Internet traffic at all (it’s a telecom, it can do any dedicated circuit you want from copper POTS to fiber optic, if you pony up).

A couple of quick thoughts about what I saw: Density in the AT&T infrastructure was easily 10x that of customer colocated racks, both in use of space and the floorplan. It is clearly a beast of a different order than the individual server environments.

There was a LOT of empty space. AT&T has walled off about 70,000 square feet of raised floor for later; it has the space to double its capacity for cooling, power and switching, and it isn’t using a lot of the capacity its already got online. AT&T could treble its managed services infrastructure footprint in the current ready space and still take on co-lo and hosting customers.

That says to me that the market is ready to supply IT infrastructure, and cloud infrastructure, when the demand is there. Much ado is made over Google’s uncountable, bleeding-edge servers, and Amazon’s enormous cloud environment, or Microsoft’s data centers, but here in Watertown is the plain fact that the people who really do infrastructure are ready, and waiting, for the market. The long-term future of cloud infrastructures is probably in these facilities, and not with Google or Microsoft or Amazon.

Oh, and, Verizon has a building right next door. It’s bigger than AT&T’s.

While Redwood is still vapor as far as the public is concerned (and the basic VMware cloud technology, vCloud is still in pre-release at ver. 09) – it’s clear that VMware thinks it can capitalize on its position as the default virtualization platform for the enterprise and swoop in to become the private cloud platform of choice as enterprises increasing retool their data centers to look, and work, more like services like Rackspace and Amazon Web Services.

Some people are grumpy about the term private cloud, saying it’s just a data center modernized and automated to the hilt – let’s get that out of the way by noting that “private cloud” is a lot easier to say than “highly automated and fully managed self-provisioning server infrastructure data center system with integrated billing”. It’s also less annoying than “Infrastructure 3.0″, a term that can make normally calm operators scream like enraged pterodactyls. Private cloud it is.

Project Redwood, now known as the VMware Service Director, will lay over a VMware vSphere installation and allow users governed self-service usage via a web portal and an API, effectively obscuring both the data center hardware and the virtualization software VMware customers are used to operating. The goal is to automate resource management so that admins don’t have to and make distributing computing resources as easy and flexible as possible, while maintaining full control.

According to the presentation, vCloud Service Director will support three modes of resource management: “Allocation pools“, where users are given a ‘container’ of resources and allowed to create and use VMs anyway they like up to the limits of the CPU and storage they paid for; “Reservation pools“, which give users a set of resources they can increase or decrease by themselves and “Pay-per-VM” for single-instance purchasing.

–From the article

That’s the IT side taken care of- the other really significant concept is vApps- users can build, save and move application stacks en suite, and will be able to flow out of their private cloud into VMware-approved public cloud services– vCloud Express hosters like BlueLock and Terremark. So admins get control and visibility, and users get true scalability and self-service. That means there’s something for everyone in the enterprise.

Other tidbits from the document-VMware’s concept of cloud:

Cloud Computing according to VMware
Lightweight entry/exit service acquisition model
Consumption based pricing
Accessible using standard internet protocols
Elastic
Improved economics due to shared infrastructure
Massively more efficient to manage

And how Redwood is the answer:

Project Redwood Strategy
High-Level: Enable broad deployment of
compute clouds by:
• Delivering a software solution enabling self-service
access to compute infrastructure
• Establishing the most compelling platform for
internal and external clouds
Approach
• Allow enterprises to create fully-functional internal
cloud infrastructure
• Create a broad ecosystem of cloud providers to
give enterprises choice
• Provide identical interfaces between internal and
external clouds to allow toolsets to operate
identically with either
• Enable developers on the cloud platform to create
new applications within a cloud framework

Of course, there are products that can already do this and already well on the way to maturity- Abiquo springs to mind. You can do everything Redwood is shooting for today, if you’re so inclined. A titillating report says an audience that reportedly contained VMware engineers cheered during an Abiquo demo. The problem is you have to bring your own hypervisor- few want their YAVS(Yet Another Vendor Syndrome)infection complicated.

Oracle, on the other hand, has reinvented itself as a “complete stack” of private cloud products, from the Sun iron on up, and IBM is happy to sell you iron that behaves like cloud, and so on.

But VMware is betting brand loyalty, severe antipathy towards non-commodity hardware and inertia will catapult it past the upstarts and comfortably ahead of Microsoft, its real competition here, which is shooting for the same goal with Hyper-V and the Dynamic Data Center but is at least a year behind VMware here.

Enterprises running clouds are inevitable, goes the thinking; virtualization is ideally suited to both cloud computing and the commoditized hardware market–provide the entire software stack needed to turn those servers and switches into compute clouds, and you’ll make out like a bandit, especially when the only serious competition to try and offer the same thing right now is Canonical on one extreme, and Oracle on the other.

If you are running an enterprise data center, want drop-in, one-stop cloud computing, and your options are “free–from hippies” or “bend over“, VMware, who already makes your preferred hypervisor, will be a favored alternative. All they have to do is execute.

The project is a collaboration between the IT giants to pool computing resources at different sites into a “testbed” cloud and open it to researchers. Whitney said that Open Cirrus has about 300 researchers onboard since announcing partnerships with far-flung computer science labs in Russia, Malaysia and South Korea. He said HP has contributed about 10,000 computing nodes(virtual servers), Yahoo! about 3-4,000, and the other partners are kicking in at least 1,000 nodes each.

“We’re definitely envisioning an open-source software stack under the GPL” he said, similar to the eponymous LAMP software stack. He said they are experimenting with existing free cloud technologies (like EUCALYPTUS) and also gathering data from HP Labs’ own hardware installation, which runs on commodity HP data center servers.

Whitney said his team is also experimenting on a low level with using optical fiber communications on server backplanes and heating and cooling techniques in HP’s installation.

At a higher level, researchers are focusing on different applications for Hadoop, like data mining applications and “wide-area Hadoop” — data processing over distant geographical locations. There is a short list of current projects, but more are expected from the new partner sites.

Several open source cloud projects exist already, like Spanish Abiquo and UC-Berkeley’s EUCALYPTUS (released on Ubuntu 9.10), Canadian Enomaly, the Globus Nimbus project and others. Cloud leaders like Amazon and Rackspace run their clouds on open source technology but do not release their technology publicly. IBM is facilitating an EU-funded project called RESERVOIR, but it’s goals appear to be stretgic rather than practical.

HP’s entry, when and if it arrives, will mark the first open source cloud platform released by a major commercial vendor; certainly something to watch.