Jeremy Filliben, CCIE #3851 & CCDE #20090003 (@jfilliben) and Brandon Carroll, CCIE #23827 (@brandoncarroll) join the Prime Pushers for an hour-long round-table discussion of the week’s news.  And if you missed Greg last week, he’s back – with rant mode decidedly ON.

• More on Cisco’s shipping and lead time woes, this time regarding the Catalyst 6500 platform and ASIC manufacturing challenges.  At what point do network engineers stop waiting for Cisco and start looking seriously at other vendors who can deliver product quickly?
• Sun/Oracle unleashes a beast in the 10G top-of-rack space:  a 72-port, 10G, non-blocking 1RU monster switch.
• Cisco marketing muddies the TRILL waters with an NX-OS feature called FabricPath.  Best as the Pushers can tell, FabricPath is essentially a proprietary version of TRILL.  Better than calling it “Borderless Data Centers”, we guess…
• and Greg has made a poster about Borderless Networks
• Brandon and Jeremy were at CiscoLive in Las Vegas June 27 – July 1, 2010, and give us the low-down on the event, including the heart-to-heart chat John Chambers had with the NetVets.
• We talk about the newly announced iPad-wannabe Cisco Cius, and chew over the question we’re all wondering…how far can Cisco stray from their core competencies before it affects their business?  Or has it already?
• We scratch our heads at the overly complicated interface of CiscoLiveVirtual, secretly wishing we could get paid to create something so obtuse.
• Twenty-somethings prefer open (read: “insecure”) computing environments in the workplace – more freedom to connect personal devices to the corporate network, etc.  Do you?  Do we?

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© Etherealmind for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Show 10 – It’s a TRILL to Cius at CiscoLive…
Read more posts categorized as Favorites, Networking

But what does this all mean to enterprise IT? Who benefits from these vertically-integrated stacks? Who stands to lose out? To paraphrase the wise Jedi master, Yoda, “cloudy, the future is.” So, the stack wars have begun!

What’s a Stack?

The largest IT infrastructure vendors are aligning their own products and joining together in alliances to create vertically-integrated “datacenter in a box” stacks that include server, storage, networking, and higher-level software for virtualization and management. Cisco and EMC are certainly at the forefront of this development with their Acadia VCE vBlock, as demonstrated and deconstructed at our Tech Field Day earlier this month. The reinvigorated HP has its own offering in this space, and is unique in its ability to use all in-house hardware, and IBM and Oracle/Sun are serious challengers. Today, Hitachi announced their own Unified Compute Platform as well.

The battle of the stacks extends upward into software as well. Although VMware and Microsoft (and don’t forget Citrix) are quick to point out that they can run on anyone’s hardware stack, they are being pulled into the war through alliances, ownership, and old feuds. VMware forms the “V” in the Cisco/EMC “VCE” stack, though they also linked up with Cisco and NetApp in February. HP and Microsoft signed an even bigger agreement in January, suggesting that Hyper-V is their preferred virtualization solution. Hitachi’s UCP digs deep into the Microsoft solution set and mixes in home-grown software to do everyone else one better. But perhaps it will be Oracle/Sun who will deliver a real software-focused stack, given Oracle’s historical focus.

All of these stacks have a few things in common:

1. Standard hardware configurations are specified for ease of purchasing and support
2. The hardware stack includes blade servers, integrated I/O technology, Ethernet networking for connectivity, and SAN or NAS storage
3. Unifying software is included to manage the hardware components in one interface
4. A joint services organization is available to help in selection, architecture, and deployment
5. Higher-level software, from the virtualization hypervisor through application platforms, will be included as well

Who’s Driving?

Although all of these stacks include software components, it is interesting to note that it is the hardware guys who are in the driver’s seat. Microsoft and VMware are surely wary of tying up too closely with any one server or storage vendor, lest they lose the ability to compete in other environments. One expects these two to announce partnerships across a few hardware stacks, though it is unlikely that they will both fully integrate with every offering.

When it comes to stack hardware, only HP has a complete solution, having recently acquired 3COM, LeftHand, and Ibrix. IBM, Dell, and Oracle are thin on networking technology, though their storage story is stronger than many give them credit for. EMC clearly lacks the server and networking components and so tied up with a complementary Cisco who is strong in both areas. Then there is Hitachi, with a solid reputation in storage and strong but relatively unknown blade server offering but no clarity on the networking side. Perhaps HDS is already on the phone with Xsigo, VirtenSys, or Arista?

Certainly, all of these hardware vendors would like to offer a complete solution. This leads one to assume that many of the smaller hardware companies will soon be acquired, since they cannot hope to offer their own stack. The networking and virtual I/O companies are especially juicy targets, but don’t count storage out either. One could certainly imagine Cisco picking up a storage company or two and leaving EMC at the altar! Compellent is undervalued right now, and 3PAR must look pretty good, too.

The Cloud Angle

What doe these stacks have to do with that other megatrend in IT, cloud computing? There are two angles here:

1. Integrated stacks are the perfect foundation for private and public cloud deployment, providing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) as a turnkey purchase. I called this the “home theater in a box” concept at Tech Field Day: A single line item gets you all the components you need to roll out a large-to-huge virtualization-ready infrastructure.
2. Integrated stacks are a lame attempt for the hardware guys to stay relevant in a public cloud world. Public cloud providers are taking a top-down approach to infrastructure with most relying on generic commodity servers, storage, and networking rather than buying from the big-iron providers in the stack wars. This consolidation mirrors the dying breaths of the British auto industry, which attempted to retain their hold on the market through scale rather than competitive products.

It’s not immediately clear whether one, both, or neither of these arguments truly provides the impetus for these hardware stacks, but the vendors are all pushing them as cloud-ready. Certainly, the advent of cloud computing is a major factor.

Only the Beginning

This is only the beginning of the stack wars. I have asked the Gestalt IT authors and Tech Field Day delegates to weigh in on this subject, and expect to see a number of insightful pieces written on the topic in the coming weeks. I will continue covering the topic as well. Please consider subscribing to the Gestalt IT RSS feed or following @GestaltIT on Twitter to stay up to date on the latest developments. Thoughtful comments and responses are always welcome as well.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | The Stack Wars Have Begun!
Read more posts categorized as Cloud Computing, Exclusive, Featured, Networking, Server Virtualization, Storage, Top Story

Now it can ship Solaris/SPARC/Sun Storage stacks underneath its database and other middleware and use Solaris virtualization features. Where does that leave us, wanting as we do to sell storage and our software into Oracle shops?

I’ve had an exec group working on this for some months and I’m gonna let you in on our game plan.

For those Oracle shops that run Oracle software on third-party servers, it’s the same story as now, for now. We pich the UCS vBlocks against the servers there and our Symmetrix/CLARiiON/Celerra against the storage alternatives there; basically no change.

In the longer term, though, we have to weaken Oracle in those accounts because Ellison’s crew will be selling the integrated Oracle stack story, what I call blowing Sun shine up their asses. That cuts us out, it’s a door-closer. The first way we counter this is to start making friends with SAP and Microsoft SQL. We’ll look for joint-selling type deals because we now have a shared enemy so we better be friends, right? This is my kind of fun.

The second way is for us to extend vBlocks up the stack. Customers are going to want integrated stacks from their applications right through to their disk spindles and flash drives. Larry may be a weird west coast cookie with a taste for things outside normal family life but he’s no flake when it comes to business. He’s right on the nail over this integrated stack thing. We’re going to have to talk to people like SAP and SQL and Terradata and Netezza and say, let’s build our own integrated app stack, let’s build a SAP vBlock, a SQL vBlock, whatever. Integrate your software onto our vBlock hardware and let’s bite Larry in the ass.

The third thing we have to do is push our aquisition horizons up a bit more. Oracle buys Sun and heads our way. Okay Larry, you want a fight, you got a fight. Let’s buy into his middleware market core, let’s stick a stake right in his heartland. Could we buy SAP? Would this be a better idea than buying Dell? I’m having our acquisitions team look around Larry’s software territory and spy out the possibilities.

Where Larry sells Sun storage separately, into Oracle shops using third-party servers and into non-Oracle shops if that’s what he’s going to do, then we should do well. The 7000 is obviously not mission-critical and not tested for that kind of work in enterprise data centers. It was put together by too-clever Sun engineers with open source software, so how can you rely on it? That systems organization at Sun was run by a guy that couldn’t comb his hair and he reported to a guy with a pony-tail. These people were flakes, they still are flakes, and you can’t trust them or their products.

Now joke time; the mid-range and low-end Sun storage arrays are not even on the same planet as CLARiiON and Celerra. We’ve been busting their chops and will continue doing that. The hybrid storage servers, Thumper or whatever the thing is called, is probably doomed but I’m having a team look over the possibility of putting a few UCS blades alongside bladed CLARiiON stores into an appliance and then we’ve got a Thumper-buster if we need one.

What about the StorageTek tapes? Two words: Data and Domain. If that’s not enough we can do a deal with Spectra, as Belluzzo isn’t talking to us anymore. That’ll give us a big enough tape library until Atmos clouds can do the business.

Larry E is just a wildly successful big mouth who’s going to over-reach himself. His golden goose is his software profitability through commoditizing everything else. We’re going to chip away at that by doing deals with SAP and the others and cut this over-grown Silicon Valley playboy down to size. He’s disrespectful but we can’t yet make him an offer he can’t refuse. Trust me, we’re going to be working on it, and Larry’s going to regret the day that he ever let McNealy soft soap him.

© Don Joey for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Ellison Ain’t No Sun King
Read more posts categorized as Industry Confidential

1. the iPad launch by Apple
2. the completion of the Sun takeover by Oracle

But actually they had a very common theme: control.

Let’s take Apple and the iPad and indeed all their products; Apple exert complete control of the hardware that their product runs on; indeed on their mobile devices, they even control the applications that run on their hardware. Some people hate this, they really do not like this controlling element; they go out of their way to do things to break-free of this controlling element.

But for some reason, we stick with Apple’s products; we may hate the company but we love the product; we accept their control grudgingly. We like the fact that we don’t have to waste our precious time making things work together. And at the end of the day, we can get out of the relationship with Apple pretty easily if we really decide we don’t like them.

Now let’s take Oracle and Sun; Larry has looked back at history to the IBM of the 60s and I suspect at his friend Steve and decided I want some of that control.  In fact, Oracle found people who say that are looking forward to Oracle controlling the whole stack? The one throat to choke but I’m willing to be that in big Enterprise computing, no-one really wants this; they don’t want to be locked in to a single vendor. We’ve been there and done that; we have choice, we have competition.

Yes, at one level, life would be a lot easier with a single throat to choke but we know where that leads and we know if we get too much into bed with Oracle, it’s going to be major struggle to get out of the relationship. There’s too much at stake to allow Oracle the same level of control we grudgingly accept from Apple.

© Martin for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Controlling Behaviour
Read more posts categorized as Featured, Tech

But the approvals haven’t stopped Mr. Ellison’s Team from redesigning the SUN ORACLE Exadata platform Version 2 (With SUN ORACLE logo’s on it). A joint venture between ORACLE and SUN has been on for several years now. Today was the day when the new Exadata platform version 2 was presented to the world by Mr. Ellison himself. It was truly visible, that Mr. Ellison is already taking a lot of pride with this acquisition even before its approved.

There was an advertisement earlier this week from ORACLE SUN challenging IBM and all its products and how Mr. Ellison now wants to go after IBM to become the top Infrastructure company. Said that, there are only 3 big infrastructure companies today, IBM and HP going neck to neck in terms of revenues competing for the 1st position, while the pending approval of ORACLE – SUN at number three.

Through it is great to see the vision of Mr. Ellison and how he is internally transforming ORACLE from being a software database company to an Infrastructure company. Today’s announcement of SUN ORACLE Exadata version 2 platform is very unique in that sense. Exadata products has been developed with years of partnership between SUN and ORACLE, but goes to show how both the combined companies can fulfill the datacenter vision END to END.

This platform extensively uses the SUN FlashFire technology and is truly the first OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) System designed to optimize customer data processing using a mix of SUN hardware and ORACLE software. It was very noticeable during the 35 minutes introduction where Mr. Ellison drove the presentation for more than 25 minutes and then handed over to John Fowler, EVP SUN for a technical talk.

Clearly ORACLE is targeting IBM and NCR – Teradata products with the release of this platform. It was obvious in the presentation that Mr. Larry Ellison used the word “THEY” numerous times signaling towards IBM and NCR. Though it was not said during the presentation, “THEY” could include HP as well. At this point without the final approval of the SUN purchase, it wouldn’t make a lot of sense for ORACLE to make another enemy, HP.

Here are some SUN ORACLE Exadata Version 2 platform highlights

1. Exadata Version 2 is optimized for OLTP (Online Transaction Processing), first in its kind to hit the market.
2. Typically SUN ORACLE Exadata Version 2 should give customers a 50X to 100X better performance than standard data warehousing servers.
3. Optimized for Random I/O
4. 1M IOPS per system cabinet
5. Each system cabinet has 8 Compute servers, 176 total processors, 336 TB of Raw Disk, 5TB of Flash Cache (56 Flash Cache cards), 400GB to total DRAM in the 8 compute servers.
6. Intel Nehalem processors, Infiniband switching, FlashCache, 4 Ethernet links per database node.
7. Runs Linux System, Oracle manages cache, fully redundant compute servers and storage. On demand capacity expansion as it relates to compute servers, storage or Infiniband switches.
8. 1 Node (computer server) is the smallest configuration, large configurations can be 8 nodes in one cabinet or 32 cabinets combined together to massively have 32 Million IOPS or several 100 Petabyte of storage optimized for OLTP.
9. Infiniband speed per link is 40 Gbps aggregating to 880 Gbps for a system (cabinet), Non Blocking switch gives a full open & distributed system access for faster processing.
10. Power consumption less than Exadata version 1.0 by 14%
11. Fastest OLTP system, Fastest Data Warehousing system in the world
12. All calculations done in memory (FlashCache), optimizing the system.
13. Massively Parallel Processing, the scale out architecture helps and enables easy on demand expansion.

Couple things to note:

1. Mr. Ellison calls Flash Disk as Dumb Flask Disk, truly remarkable.
2. Also another highlight was to use 56 Flash Cache cards per system (5 TB) and then use 168 x 2TB SATA drives (Possibly 7.2K RPM) to optimize data space (Somehow didn’t make a lot of sense).

Some Questions to Consider :

1. Is this a real threat to Storage & Host providers where you have specialized Hardware / Software combination optimizing your performance for certain applications?
2. Is this the power of ORACLE SUN that we will see in the future?
3. How does this compete with EMC COMPUTE platform (rumors) or the Cisco – EMC Alpine Project (rumors)?
4. Does the VCE (VMware – Cisco – EMC) partnership really focus towards the giant to come ORACLE SUN?
5. What will happen to the ORACLE – HP partnership if the ORACLE SUN buyout gets approval, what happens to HP – Oracle Exadata?
6. Does this create any Antitrust scenarios for the future?
7. Is Mr. Ellison’s dream to own the infrastructure end with the purchase of SUN?

Here are some links for references if you would like to read more about Exadata products

http://www.orafaq.com/wiki/Exadata_FAQ

http://www.sun.com

http://www.oracle.com

© Devang for Gestalt IT, 2009. | SUN ORACLE Exadata Version 2: Showing the power of ORACLE SUN
Read more posts categorized as All, Cloud Computing, Featured, Networking, Storage

Since no company (except perhaps Salesforce.com) derives 100% of its revenues from cloud computing at this point, none can be called true cloud computing companies. But we can attempt to determine to what extent each has jumped into the market.

One might also include 3PAR, Compellent, NetApp, Cisco, HP, Dell, and other vendors of hardware used by cloud service providers. Others that might be included include Red Hat, Novell, Unisys, and Symantec.

Please leave a comment below if you have any suggestions. I envision this becoming a living list (perhaps a Wiki) in the future.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2009. | The Public Corporate Face of Cloud Computing
Read more posts categorized as Cloud Computing, Exclusive, Featured, Top Story

Unlike IBRIX, which sold software to transform commodity hardware into a clustered NAS solution, ONStor designed both the hardware and software included in their home-grown products. The company also re-sold Fujitsu’s Eternus and Nexsan SATA storage systems and Tek-Tools software. ONStor raised $80 million in its 9 years of operation.

LSI has found success supplying hardware components to the storage and networking markets. In April, the company purchased the 3ware RAID adapter business from AMCC. LSI’s storage operations were to be spun out as Engenio in a 2004 IPO that never happened. That operation later re-joined the LSI mothership, combining with the storage controller business. This is where ONStor will land as well. LSI manufactures components on an OEM basis for many in the storage industry, including BlueArc, IBM, MaXXan, Sepaton, and Sun.

What does LSI get for their $25 million?

• ONStor’s EverON software, which powers its NAS and IP storage product lines and includes the StorFS scalable file system. EverON offers clustering with a global namespace, automated pooling and provisioning, and snapshots.
• The Bobcat and Cougar Broadcom-powered NAS gateway hardware platforms offer energy-efficient and scalable virtualized and clustered NAS in front of existing SAN or NAS storage capacity using the EverON OS.
• The Pantera system uses Intel Xeon CPUs and adds iSCSI to the mix. It uses a different operating system which leverages ZFS.
• ONStor also re-sold the Fujitsu Eternus 2000 and 4000 Fibre Channel SAN storage systems.

LSI is likely to be eager to leverage the EverON software and Bobcat/Cougar platforms with their OEM partners. Expect many vendors (ahem: IBM) to quickly counter HP’s new IBRIX-powered scalable NAS with LSI-powered alternatives. The Pantera seems less-likely to be of interest to OEMs, being based on commodity hardware and software. And continuation of the Eternus line seems flat-out illogical.

More coverage: Terri McClure and Mark Peters of ESG

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2009. | LSI Picks Up ONStor
Read more posts categorized as Exclusive, Featured, Storage, Top Story

Were their employees not simply selling books but also devouring them to solve their own internal problems? And without Amazon beginning to scare the beejesus out of the traditional IT suppliers, would we have cloud? 

People talk about UCS being Cisco’s reaction to HP stepping over the line in the sand. And this may be true! But it is Amazon who people should be scared about; a company which understands global markets, logistics on a massive scale, flexibility and agility. These are all core to a company which has become synomymous with Online Retail. An IT infrastructure which has proved itself to scale very quickly and allows small start-ups run Enterprise class infrastructure without huge capital outlay.

With the exception of the EC2 cloud, Amazon are offering interesting and thought provoking services which could change the way that applications are developed. But I’m not especially interested in these as an infrastructure bod in the here and now.

The EC2 cloud is more interesting, not because it is especially exciting or innovative; it’s not really but it is more applicable to the here and now. And I had initially dismissed it as just a mere so-what hosting exercise and to a limited extent it is but it might well turn out to be as important as VMWare and it is this which I suspect is beginning to frighten people.

Lets for example, take an Enterprise which is running all of its core systems on Solaris systems; with the current travails of Sun, merger rumours and a general push to reduce costs, a decision might be made to replatform the core applications to run on Linux.

But do I really want to install a large Linux infrastructure initially? That’ll take time and more importantly money; I might not have enough space in my data-centre, I might not yet have decided on my corporate Linux infrastructure standards. As the head of development, I probably don’t want to wait for my Infrastructure teams to get their acts together; I want something *now* and I want it quickly.

Step-up the Amazon EC2 cloud; quickly and easily, without jumping through the hoops that the Infrastructure teams want me to jump through, probably without a huge amount of IT process such as change management, I can have a scalable and pretty robust Linux infrastructure.

Yes, I could have done it with other companies but Amazon is the company which appears to have the vision and strategy to take this forward. External clouds buy me the one thing that I cannot really buy, time.

So I start hosting my development environments in the Cloud and because my internal IT infrastructure teams are too slow, I put them in the external Cloud. Sure for the time being, I’ll probably keep my production workloads in-house but in the same way that production work-loads started to move to VMware, how long before I’m experimenting with production workloads?

And that is without Amazon’s more interesting services which could really change things. It makes you wonder about some of the other non-traditional IT companies, what have they got hidden away? There’s some interesting stuff been done by some of the games companies for instance which may well have wider application.

Clouds are fuzzy things and boundaries will become blurred. May we live in interesting times.

© Martin for Gestalt IT, 2009. | Amazon – The World’s Bookshop and IT Supplier?
Read more posts categorized as All, Cloud Computing, Storage

Like clockwork, VMware has cranked out another update to their flagship enterprise product, ESX 3.5. The last update came out in early November, 2008, and included some major new functionality. What’s in store this time to intrigue storage folks? Not much.

For more information on earlier updates, see my articles:

• Storage Fixes in VMware ESX Server 3.5 Update 2
• Storage Changes in VMware ESX 3.5 Update 3

Expanded Support for Enhanced vmxnet Adapter

Not specifically a storage change, but the enhanced vmxnet adapter introduced back in the original release of ESX 3.5 now works with most versions of Windows Server 2003 and XP Pro. Look for improved performance when using guest-side SMB and NFS as well as the guest iSCSI initiator. Note that you cannot select this driver when configuring non-Enterprise Edition machines; you have to select Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) regardless of which version of Server 2003 you are using.

Expanded SAS and SATA Controller Support

If you’d like to install ESX on a server equipped with a PMC 8011, Intel ICH9 or ICH10, CERC 6/I SATA/SAS Integrated RAID Controller, or HP Smart Array P700m Controller, you’ll find happiness in Update 4.

The Intel controllers are especially important, as we’re seeing them used more and more and this driver is more full-featured than the earlier Broadcom HT 1000 and Intel ICH7 drivers. The Intel ICH9/ICH10 is a dual-mode (IDE/ATA and AHCI/SATA) driver, supports SATA hard drives, SSDs, and optical drives, and now enables VMFS support when in AHCI/SATA mode. It’s not clear whether VMware actually supports VMFS datastores on ICH9/10 SATA, but it says it works. Anyone want to try it out? One thing is certain: You can’t use SATA drives in a shared/clustered environment because SATA does not include reservations. See this tech note and especially this question:

Earlier, it was mentioned that we can create VMFS if we use AHCI/SATA mode. If so, why did VMware not claim VMFS support when using SATA controller running in AHCI/SATA mode?

VMware might decide to add support in the near future. There is no strong need to have VMFS support on a SATA drive, because native SATA protocol does not support reserve/release. Reserve/release is needed if VMFS is used as clustered file system in a shared disk environment.

PXE Boot Support

Rich at VM/ETC points out that Update 4 includes experimental PXE boot support for ESX and ESXi. As he notes, this has major implications for cloud computing platforms, since it means that ESX servers can boot guests without local storage at all. Very interesting! Let’s bet that Update 5 (expected in June or July) will include this as a supported option.

Updated QLogic, Emulex, and LSI Drivers

Like most ESX updates, this one included updated Fibre Channel drivers.

• The QLogic Fibre Channel Adapter driver and firmware (versions 7.08-vm66 and 4.04.06, respectively) include bug fixes and enhanced NPIV support.
• On the Emulex side, driver version 7.4.0.40 supports the company’s HBAnyware 4.0 management software.
• Users of SAS and SCSI LSI MegaRAIDs will find driver version 3.19vmw (megaraid_sas) and 2.6.48.18 vmw (mptscsi) which improves performance and enhances event handling capabilities.

Expanded Sun Storage Array Support

All you StorageTek loyalists out there will be happy to see support for Sun’s low-end StorageTek 2530 SAS array as well as the modular 6580 and 6780 Fibre Channel arrays. It looks like just about every model in Sun’s current storage lineup is now supported in ESX.

Expanded Network Card Support

Support for Gigabit cards is greatly expanded, including HP’s quad-port NC375i and dual-port NC362i and NC360m, Intel’s Gigabit CT and 82574L, and NetXtreme’s BCM5722, BCM5755, BCM5755M, and BCM5756. Intel’s widely-used 10-gig 82598EB cards are now supported as well.

Tweaks and Fixes

Looking through the release notes, a few storage-related tweaks and fixes stand out:

1. WMware can optionally automatically throttle back the queue depth when congestion is encountered. See Controlling LUN queue depth throttling in VMware ESX for 3PAR Storage Arrays for more information.
2. VMklinux module heap size can now be adjusted as LUN queue-depth values are increased. Since tuning LUN queue depths is one common trick of the storage trade to improve performance, especially in queue-stingy systems like ESX, this is welcome news. But call VMware support before you monkey with it!
3. An RDM-related issue where SCSI inquiry data over 36 bytes was truncated or corrupted (for example when using Microsoft VSS and NetApp SnapDrive) has been resolved.

Well, that’s all folks. I suggest you all read the release notes for yourself, and please leave a comment if you see an error in what I wrote here or have something to add!

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2009. | Storage Changes in VMware ESX 3.5 Update 4
Read more posts categorized as All, Server Virtualization, Storage

Sun is leveraging the assets they acquired from Q-layer earlier this year on top of OpenSolaris, MySQL, ZFS, and just about everything else in their arsenal to offer their own virtual data center (VDC) strategy. The Sun Cloud will be a private (inside the firewall) environment offering mobility of virtual machines. Q-layer had partnerships with both VMware and Microsoft and functioned with Windows, OpenSolaris, and Linux, suggesting that this will be quite a full-featured offering. Suddenly Sun’s free OpenSolaris offering on Amazon EC2 makes a lot more sense – it provides a gateway to take virtual computing business from the Bezos team!

One very nifty angle Sun is taking is enabling VirtualBox system images to be saved to (and presumably run in) their cloud. I wonder about monetization, since VirtualBox is more of a desktop virtualization system than VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V, but the prospect of clicking “Upload to Cloud” is intriguing! OpenOffice will also allow cloud storage, a foil to Google Apps.

The Sun Cloud also includes a managed storage service. Sun apparently has three storage protocols: A proprietary Sun Cloud Storage API, WebDAV, and an object API likely leveraging Amazon’s AWS. The company claims that they are API-compatible with AWS, allowing applications written with Amazon in mind to be easily ported to their cloud storage service.

One key point to consider with all of this cloud talk, however, is how prepared each company is to support enterprise computing needs. Long-term viability depends on paying customers, and only the largest systems can attract enough end-user nickels and dimes to survive. Enterprise solutions are where the real money is, and questions remain about how prepared companies like Amazon, Google, and Rackspace are to support the needs of corporate users.

There are really three cloud markets: Shared clouds for small developers and enterprise customers and private cloud systems. Amazon was strong from the start with the little guys, Web 2.0 startups and end-user services like Jungle Disk, and Rackspace/Mosso and Google are challenging them in this space. Sun’s focus on AWS compatibility and VirtualBox suggests that they plan to play in this sandbox.

But the enterprise cloud is another matter entirely. Nirvanix stands strong in shared managed storage services, racking up win after win with big customers. EMC, VMware, Microsoft and others are positioning themselves as private alternatives in this space. Will Sun try to compete here, too? They are certainly talking about private clouds and the virtual data center, but there is a serious risk that they will lose focus trying to take on too many roles, and enterprise users won’t tolerate poor pre- and post-sales support! 

You might also want to read these other posts…

• EMC Atmos Versus VMware VDC-OS: Will The Real Cloud Strategy Please Stand Up?
• Top Ten Coolest Enterprise Storage Flops
• Granularity: The Hidden Challenge of Storage Management
• VMware Virtual Datacenter Operating System: Heavyweight or Hot Air?

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2009. | Sun Launches Their Own Cloud, But For Which Market?
Read more posts categorized as All, Cloud Computing, Featured, Server Virtualization, Storage