Virtualization

Cisco/EMC joint venture: private & public cloud data center strategy

Cisco, EMC and VMware have formed a joint venture called “Acadia” to promote a new vision of the data center, built on virtualization and presumably cloud-ready elements. Intel will also have a small stake in the deal. The core of this venture is an architecture built on technology from all three, who form what they call the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) Coalition.

The “product” is a set of Vblock Infrastructure Packages that are essentially ready-to-install combinations of software and hardware to support security, virtualization, networking, computing and storage. Acadia will sell, install and sustain this as the customer requires, and we’re hearing they have their first contracts in the bag in Asia and the EU, with one in the U.S. likely coming within 45 days.

The concept is also targeted at both private and public clouds, and in this aspect it could be the basis for something highly interesting to service providers and even somewhat competitive as a service-layer technology. So far none of the players seem to be positioning Acadia as a generalized solution for the service layer, and we can’t find any indication of new products other than element management for the Vblocks, but the value of the package concept is considerable for users whose needs fit in the framework of the three Vblock configurations.

Professional services and a developer ecosystem are also provided; the latter may be where service-layer technology comes into the picture. We think that a service-layer extension to the VCE concept could put a lot of pressure on other network vendors. Ericsson has no real announced strategy, Alcatel-Lucent and NSN have strategies they’re not really opening up on, and Juniper has just announced a major service-layer innovation. All of these would need to accommodate whatever positioning Cisco might make.

Juniper/Dell OEM deal validates rising IT power in the data center

Juniper has announced an OEM deal with Dell that will have the latter re-skinning the MX, EX, and SRX products and offering them as a part of the Dell PowerConnect brand. The deal is a validation of the truth we articulated this time last year: Data center IT is now powering data center networking from an enterprise political perspective.

That means network vendors need an IT hook, and Dell offers Juniper another one (Juniper has a deal with IBM). One interesting slant on this is that Dell has other deals with Cisco and Brocade, and both of those make sense given the strong position those companies have in data center and storage networking. But Juniper is a relative up-and-coming.

Since Juniper made a big deal of its Stratus fabric for the data center at its analyst event in early spring, it may be that Dell sees Juniper as having a strengthening role. Juniper is also a leader in financial applications that require low latency, which is a sector every data center player is interested in. Dell and Juniper will also partner on Data Center Bridging, an extension to Ethernet that provides the lossless transfer that’s needed for data center storage and virtualization applications. DCB is also something that some operators are looking at as a cloud data center service.

Cisco’s ISR G2 and Borderless Networking: Service layer implications?

Cisco has announced a new generation of its popular ISR platform (G2, fittingly), and also announced an initiative/architecture called Borderless Networking. The ISR upgrades are performance enhancements to the earlier models based on what Cisco calls the “Service-Ready Engine” that can support Linux applications directly, not through the older AXP insert card.

Borderless Networking is harder to pin down, however. It appears to be what a Cisco PR video calls a “recommitment” of Cisco to some core technologies rather than a new announcement. But it is possible that Cisco will offer something new and substantive there. From the positioning, it appears to be a service-layer strategy focused on creating an “IT control plane” from Cisco’s data center and virtualization technology. Whether it’s real or slideware is the question.

Cisco often makes announcements like this to anticipate announcements by competitors, and a number of them may be planning something in the service layer area within the next month. As we’ve noted, this is a critical area, and if Cisco can create a credible “IT control plane” based on data center virtualization, it could have an impact in the space. Recent trends within Cisco management and organization, however, seem to suggest a de-emphasis on software products and on network abstraction and management, key ingredients in a service-layer strategy.

Cisco and Oracle look to change data center landscape

Oracle and Cisco may change the landscape in the data center if the companies continue to pursue their current tracks, according to most pundits, and we agree.

Oracle is already the giant of middleware, broader there even than IBM and more focused on making software the premier offering. The Oracle approach to IT is to create a brand around software and middleware, adding hardware to reap the maximum benefit from the sale, but focusing on software (especially middleware) for differentiation.

Cisco wants to ride virtualization and connectivity in the data center, and collaborative applications that link employees, into a dominant position. Cisco’s theory is that owning collaboration could give the company a foot into every application door because collaboration is the broadest of all horizontal applications.

Both companies face competition from incumbent giants IBM and HP, and the big question for 2010 is whether the competition among this group of four will create enough market buzz to build buyer literacy and interest levels enough to create a new technology buying cycle. We’re doubtful that competition alone can do it because competition typically focuses on differentiation rather than project justification. But we’ll have a better idea next month when we complete our enterprise fall planning survey.

New Google OS: Solidifying the cloud/SaaS partnership

Google is said to be announcing a new PC/netbook operating system today, a move that would make Google’s competition with Microsoft a very real thing and not just media hype. Rumors about the new OS are that it will be based on Google Chrome, the browser Google has already released, and in fact will be called Google Chrome OS.

We’re hearing that this is really a lightweight version of Android with a Chrome front-end, designed to be tightly coupled to online applications like Google Docs, Wave, Voice, etc. Chrome, the browser, is not a complete OS and would require some embedded background OS to work with and to adapt to various hardware designs; thus, the Android connection.

Our sources say that the big thrust of the new OS is to codify the SaaS/cloud partnership that Google wants to establish. In other words, it’s not about being a direct Windows competitor; it’s about extending the online paradigm where Google is already successful to the desktop via notebooks. The new OS will be available next year, though, and we expect that in the meantime, a lot of companies (including Palm) will be looking at porting their own smartphone OSS to netbooks.

Cisco talks cloud offerings, focuses on Microsoft, Google

Cisco is talking a lot at its annual user conference, Cisco Live, but it’s not always being definitive. Cisco is said to be considering an expansion to its WebEx collaboration suite to include document authoring and management that would compete, in part, with Microsoft Office, but also with Google Docs and other online applications. Cisco also said it would be virtualizing voice and making it a cloud offering, and announced some WebEx support for private clouds, departing from its original strategy to support it only as a Cisco-hosted service.

The moves come as Cisco reorganizes its development council along more traditional lines (enterprise/commercial, service provider, consumer) and largely eliminates the high-level software group that contained the WebEx products. Cisco is shifting its original everything-hosted strategy to a hybrid-cloud model in our view, which is smart given that’s what enterprises want. The question is whether Cisco wants to be the public part of the hybrid cloud or wants to empower service providers to take that role.

The comments made by Cisco’s CTO suggest that Cisco doesn’t want to be an infrastructure-as-a-service provider but isn’t ruling out platform-as-a-service and certainly not SaaS. Cisco also indicated it was ready to meet the challenge of Google Voice and Google Wave in Unified Communication, which at least shows that Google knows that Wave and Voice are UC challenges. We wonder if Cisco might not get too diverted in a battle with Google; it would be better to simply adapt Cisco UC to work inside Wave and to integrate it with Voice using APIs.

Verizon’s public cloud extension of private cloud

In what’s at least a functional up-staging of AT&T’s hosted storage announcement, Verizon has jumped into the cloud computing space with a computing-as-a-service offering that is clearly targeting enterprise concerns about security and performance.

The Verizon service, the first true cloud computing service offered by a major network operator that we know of, is a bit more expensive than Amazon’s EC2 but is integrated with Verizon’s VPN services, so users can get a meaningful single SLA, a single management and monitoring process, and a better assurance of security.

Verizon’s service can also incorporate company-owned and company-sited servers into the cloud, making it a natural tool for hybridization. This is the first cloud offering we’ve seen that addresses the key issues of enterprises—most notably the fact that public cloud services are seen as extensions of an enterprise’s private cloud initiatives.

Google e-book plans target Amazon

Google wants to sell e-books and is working to sign up authors and create a framework for the deal, which would obviously compete with Amazon’s Kindle. We think the two companies have seen each other increasingly as competitors, and for good reason.

Amazon is kind of a “instant-gratification” search option; look up what you want and buy it. The two both provide cloud services, and now Google wants to be an e-book alternative. The threat to Amazon here is real because if Google can make a generic e-book system work, it would have profound impact on the Kindle market. Others have tried to create such a system, however, and it needs a purpose-built appliance to prevent copying. Will Google propose this as a part of Android? It will be interesting to see.

AT&T storage service based on the cloud

AT&T and EMC are partnering to offer cloud storage service based on the EMC Atmos product set. The offering is called Synaptic Storage as a Service and appears to be targeted at enterprise applications like datacenter backup, but it is also likely a step by AT&T into a broader cloud computing offer. We’re hearing that Verizon has similar plans in the US, and that BT, FT, DT, KT, and NTT are also looking at storage and cloud computing internationally.

Cisco expands UCS to carrier market

Cisco, to no one’s surprise, has expanded its Unified Computing System (UCS) positioning to the service provider market, taking advantage of the interest of operators in cloud computing for both a retail service base and as a foundation for creating distributed next-gen service features. Cisco’s positioning is likely to be a response to interest from IBM, Microsoft and HP in the space, but most of all a reaction to what Oracle is likely to do with a Sun acquisition.

The service delivery platform (SDP) market has been hamstrung to date by a lack of a mission beyond voice and a lack of a general feature-friendly architecture at the platform level. Cloud computing can provide the latter, and with a flexible platform, the need to find specific non-voice drivers for deployment is reduced because the architecture can do nearly anything, respond to any trend.