Not surprisingly according to just about every research study out there, including the Open Data Center Alliance recent survey of its members, enterprise cloud is the next BIG THING.  This survey predicts an adoption rate five times faster than predictions from other research firms such as IDC and Gartner.  Of course, the numbers could be skewed by the self selected nature of the participants.  I do agree that the enterprise needs to take it seriously and move their IT portfolio to a cloud model.  Every indication is that most enterprises are mapping their cloud strategies and seriously investigating how to do just that.  However, anyone who has tried to build an enterprise cloud knows how hard it actually is.  So for enterprises anxious to move to a private cloud that do not want to take the fifteen years and thousands of engineers that it took Amazon, there are a plethora of companies that are jumping on the enterprise cloud bandwagon with simplified “cloud in a box” type offerings.  Can these premium priced products deliver on their promise to get an enterprise on a cloud platform that much faster or are they just marketing rebranding?

Most of the cloud-in-a-box products are from the usual big IT services shops.  Many of them, such as BizCloud from CSC and VirtualSystem from HP are based on VMWare with some combination of standardized network, storage and systems hardware.  vFabric from VMware seems to be more a kitchen sink of VMware owned “cloudy” products than a vertically integrated service such as Azure.  Cloudburst from IBM and VCE of course could both be considered cloud-in-a-box products, but they are hardware only integration and both come with big price tags that in my mind defeat the purpose of why companies move to the cloud to begin with — which is to save money.

That VMware is the underlying hypervisor of choice is not overly surprising since VMware owns 90% plus of the enterprise data center virtualization market already.  The enterprise is comfortable with their reliable and mature virtualization tools, so that approach would seem to be a natural fit for risk adverse organizations that want to move to the cloud as painlessly as possible.  For enterprises who do not want to pay the VMware or the big vendor premiums, there are some interesting tools from StackOPS, Dell (Crowbar) and RackSpace based on the Open Source OpenStack project.  So far these tools are more recipes and automation utilities designed for enterprises that have access to good dev/ops resources and are willing to live on the enterprise cloud leading edge.

The fallacy is that cloud architectures are not just virtualization with some added bells and whistles.  It is a different way of thinking that requires enormous changes to the enterprise IT organization, because it requires a different understanding of how IT services are delivered at scale.  The only way to realistically support tens or hundreds of thousands of systems is to automate everything; and the only way to achieve the level of automation required for a successful enterprise cloud deployment is for development, test, integration and operations to become part of a continuous process, not the separate functions they are in traditional organizations.  In the end no matter how big a check you are willing write, the current crop of cloud-in-a-box software and hardware offerings are not addressing the fundamental organizational differences between cloud infrastructure operations and IT infrastructure business as usual.

About the Author

Beth Cohen, Cloud Technology Partners, Inc.  Moving companies’ IT services into the cloud the right way, the first time!

Virtualization is no longer news.  Over the past 5 years, over 90% of all enterprises have converted their data centers from racks of physical servers to virtual architectures, with an average project cost savings of over $800K.  These numbers are compelling, but over the past two years the virtualization market has shifted yet again.

While VMware still has close to a monopoly on the enterprise market, as the market shifts more toward the use of the cloud, that lock-hold is weakening.  The majority of cloud offerings, like Amazon, Cloud.com and Terremark (recently purchased by Verizon) to name just a few examples, are not based on VMware, but rather either the Open Source Xen architecture or a proprietary platform.  The purchase of XenSource by Citrix a few years ago was a very smart move indeed. With the backing of Citrix, which has long been a major player in the enterprise market, the Xen platform is rapidly becoming more attractive to companies that have traditionally shied away from the Open Source software model.

VMware itself is jumping on the cloud bandwagon and has been rolling out new offerings that appeal to enterprises that want the flexibility and efficiency of the public cloud offerings in their private clouds.  The IT department is going to be hard pressed to win an argument with a business unit about why they cannot deliver a new server in less than six weeks, when the users can already get that service from Amazon in 20 minutes.  The vCloud offering includes such cloud friendly features such as simplified chargeback mechanisms, IT as a Service (IaaS) architectures, and self-service portals.  As the server market is rapidly saturated, VMware is actively developing desktop virtualization products, thin application technologies, and enterprise class identity management platforms to handle thousands of virtual enterprise desktops and applications.  The application, code named Horizon, is basically an ID Management proxy server that interprets a company’s AD infrastructure and presents it out to SaaS applications.  The drivers for this technology are security and control, not cost savings.  Ironically, companies have rediscovered the dumb terminal without realizing it.

The biggest news on the technology side is the development of para-virtualization and new development platforms that are optimized for virtualized and cloud environments.  Para-virtualization first developed in Xen and now in available in VMware, is a way to optimize the virtual environment by sharing resources.  By having the virtual machines share memory, CPU and disk I/O, the virtual environment can be run more efficiently than the traditional stove-piped guest OS architecture.  However, the cost is fewer supported platforms because the para-virtualized kernels must be supported by the underlying hypervisor and more risk that the security between the guest servers can be breached.  The cloud environment is heavily dependent on para-virtualization.

The other recent development is the renewed interest in new tools that leverage the virtual and cloud environments.  VMware’s purchase of SpringSource in August 2009 is an indication that the development of cloud enabled applications is going to be a huge market in the next few years.  VMware has continued to demonstrate their enthusiasm for this market with its March 2011 acquisition of WaveMaker, a company that has built tools that make it easier to use the Spring tools platform.

In the future, I would see a return to stripped down operating systems that are optimized for delivering applications like web services and databases.  Think of it as sort of a full circle reassessment of the definition of an application and an operating system.  Who needs a VM Windows server with web services on it, when what you really want is a web server?

About the Author

Beth Cohen, Cloud Technology Partners, Inc. Moving companies’ IT services into the cloud the right way, the first time!