YouTube Guinness Brilliant Six Pack Commercial

It’s obvious now that Cloud Computing is no longer just a concept. Amazon EC2 has been around for a while, vCloud Express was announced late last year, Microsoft is moving full steam ahead with Azure, and new internal cloud infrastructure and storage solutions are appearing on the scene weekly. CTOs and IT Directors are starting to see legitimate solutions for offloading some or all of their development and production workload and infrastructure to alternatives in The Cloud.

Put yourself at the helm of one of the Original Equipment Manufacturer’s (OEMs) that have made their money selling server, switch and storage hardware in the private data center to date. Faced with the future possibility that companies will have an option to run applications and services on infrastructure they don’t buy, build, or maintain, what would be your strategy for generating reoccuring business in the future?

I bring it up because of all the cloud architecture announcements. EMC announced a coalition with Cisco and VMware, NetApp has a Secure Multi Tennancy alliance with Cisco and VMware, and HP has announced an Integrated Infrastructure partnership with Microsoft. The storage OEMs are the first out the gate with the snap together infrastrucure for the cloud, but I imagine other hardware partnerships are not too far behind. VMware and Cisco UCS may already be the first with Microsoft and HP? Microsoft and VMware conveniently can run on top if it all.

Before the Alliance, Coalition, and Partnership start the Cloud Wars, everybody raise your Guinness and say “Brilliant!”

It’s brilliant because it’s a simple win / win solution no matter what happens. The appeal of Everything as a Service, Iaas, Saas, Haas, and any other “as a service” you want to think up is interesting and efficient whether implemented internally or externally. Those hardware and software providers that have a cookie cutter architecture with guidelines for implementing in a dynamic, do it yourself, modular data center should stand out as go to manufacturers.

The point is that, although the OEM partnerships may have many complex implications that are being discussed in the community from every possible angle, at the heart of the announcements is a simple desire to keep selling products. Selling them no matter who is buying – the traditional IT department or the cloud provider. Like the Guinness six pack, combining the equipment also results in more unit sold for everybody.

Brilliant!

© Rich for Gestalt IT, 2010. | If You Were An OEM Facing The Cloud What Would You Do?
Read more posts categorized as Cloud Computing, Server Virtualization

There is no doubt that VMware will provide support, enable high availability, ensure live backup and DR site fail over, as well as  develop scale, automation, monitoring and management capabilities for virtualized Zimbra. The fact that VMware is acquiring a large percentage of SMB mail accounts could mean that virtualizing those servers (if they are not already) will provide the first shining, every day business application in the cloud examples.

VMware CTO Steve Herod explains on his personal blog that purchasing Zimbra is part of VMware’s strategy to simplify IT:

“VMware’s mission is to simplify IT, and every VMware product focuses on attacking the complexity and rigidity that has crept into this world. In many ways we see the excitement over cloud computing to be a longing for a simpler, more flexible way of doing computing. The VMware strategy is to help customers achieve cloud-like efficiency and operational improvements across the major IT infrastructure investment areas.”

Other reports I’ve read seem to suggest that VMware is “seeding” it’s cloud for the SMB market by buying Zimbra, and at the same time possibly even attempting to strengthen it’s position against the looming threat from Microsoft. Maybe VMware is even trying to beat Microsoft at it’s own game but on a new battlefield. A post on The Tech Beat blog from Businessweek.com titled VMware’s ‘West Coast Offense’ explains the following:

“[Chief Operating Officer Tod] Nielsen, VMware Chief Executive Paul Maritz, and Executive Vice-President Richard McAniff are all former executives at Microsoft, whose Windows Server products compete with VMware’s software. VMware is employing a strategy similar to the one Microsoft used to dominate the desktop computing market, adding software applications that can create demand for an underlying system.”

There are certainly a lot of skeptics that say VMware’s sudden diversification is crazy. Anyone else reminded of Kevin Costner turning a corn field into a baseball diamond in the film Field of Dreams? Are there ghostly whispers echoing “If you build it he will come” in Palo Alto these days? It makes sense that VMware could accelerate cloud adoption if they provide and support (with their partners) all the critical services themselves.

I can’t help but imagine the future when I boot my client hypervisor and sync my offline VM while checking my VMware vMail (or will it be zMail?) with a native Zimbra client.

I guess Tuaw, the unofficial Apple Weblog, states what’s the most obvious for now with the post titled Zimbra and VMWare get married, cloud-shaped kids expected.

© Rich for Gestalt IT, 2010. | How Long Until I Check VMware vMail?
Read more posts categorized as Cloud Computing, Server Virtualization