VMworld Signage - "Are You Cloud Intense?"

VMworld always attracts some interesting booth strategies and signage.  We were highlighted as being one of the most innovative with our "Are you Cloud Intense?" theme on our shirts and booth imagery.

Show Your Cloud Intensity

I'm not sure we are philosophers, but we definitely know how to help customers build private clouds with IaaS management software!

Best of VMworld Award for Private Cloud Management

One of the fun elements at VMworld is participating in the “Best of VMworld” awards.  Platform Computing entered the Private Cloud Management category against 15+ vendors.  After several web meetings, live demos and reference reviews, we were awarded the Finalist position.  

Best of VMworld 2011 Private Cloud

This award follows other recent successes such as being named the #1 private cloud vendor by Forrester Research.  Customers want a trusted vendor that has proven themselves in large-scale, enterprise environments, and one that has been around for a few years.  Companies just don't want to trust their data centers to a startup with an uncertain future.  There is just too much at-risk.   

Platform team celebrates the win at VMworld!

Our private cloud / IaaS management solution, called Platform ISF, was cited for the following key differentiators:

• Cloud in a cloud in a cloud – ability to support multiple hierarchical organizational structures with nested virtual private clouds for business units, groups, projects, etc.
• Physical deployment – includes native capability to do bare metal physical provisioning all the way to complex multi-tier application structures
• Application-centric framework – IT services are captured as standardized applications or application components that are multi-tiered, virtual and physical, private and public cloud, etc.
• Automated provisioning of VMware – deep integration that maintains investment in VMware with automatic discovery, import (all or partial), synchronization, and simplification of provisioning VMware environments
• Multi-hypervisor with KVM and Xen – adds a management layer similar to vCenter on top of KVM / Xen to normalize capabilities across hypervisors
• Integration with P2V (physical to virtual) – support for multiple provisioning tools plus a Platform native option to support the ongoing transition of more applications and workloads to virtual environments
• Managing resource pools on DRS clusters – adding control over resource pools on DRS clusters with end user self-service management aligned to hierarchical account management
• Policy management - depth and breadth of policy management capabilities for both initial placement and operational service level agreements (SLAs) such as flexing up and down
• One solution – Platform ISF is an integrated set of IaaS management capabilities that span self-service, billing, automation, etc. versus requiring multiple solutions from different vendors that require stitching together

Which of these are important in your environment?

Top 5 VMworld 2011 Takeaways for Private Cloud

4 days.  115 degrees outside.  20,000 of my closest virtualization friends.  VMworld Las Vegas was quite an experience.  The Platform Computing booth was busy from start to finish with a demo of our award-winning Platform ISF private cloud (IaaS) management solution.  

From attending the keynotes and speaking with attendees, I had 5 key takeaways from the event:

1.       Private cloud is at a tipping point

Gone are the days of having to start every conversation by explaining the difference between virtualization and private cloud.  Of course this is a self-selected group but the education level has dramatically increased.  We had many people stopping by to discuss their private cloud initiatives and how to get started.

2.       VMware licensing has upset many

The new vSphere 5 licensing has caused many companies to reevaluate their dependency on VMware.  The recent price increases had disrupted their planning and created additional fears about being locked in to a costly hypervisor (vCloud = vLockIn).  VMware management tools manage VMware ESXi hypervisor--and that's it.  There is a real fear of being locked into a specific stack and/or being required to upgrade to more expensive packages with lots of unnecessary functionality.

3.       Multi-hypervisor is real

Even before the price increase, users have been evaluating a mixed hypervisor strategy.  A common discussion is VMware’s closed support at the management layers.  VMware is viewed as the gold standard when considering virtualizing production applications.  End users already have or are seriously considering adding KVM (Platform is a member of the Open Virtualization Alliance) and to a lesser extend Xen into their roadmaps for non-production use cases (for example dev and test).  These offer great density at lower cost.

4.       The rise of application-centric thinking

In the early days of private clouds, most of the focus was on the transient IT services such as an OS or VM.  Typical end users were developers needing access to standardized IT environments.  Most of our conversations included discussions about additional levels of an application stack – including the middleware, application logic, and post-provisioning scripting.  In summary, an application-centric private cloud.  By standardizing IT service definitions to include these levels and automating delivery, companies can effectively define their own PaaS.  While we position Platform ISF primarily as IaaS management, many of our customers think we are selling the solution short.  Customers are using it to define and provision their own PaaS and SaaS applications.  Ironically this was a major focus of VMware’s messaging, albeit in a hosted PaaS environment.  Most of our larger enterprise customers want to tightly integrate their on-premise data center infrastructure and security systems into an on-premise personalized PaaS. 

5.       Physical is part of cloud

When one thinks cloud, the natural mental model = virtualization.  However, I was surprised by the number of conversations where end users want to add integrated physical provisioning.  Sometimes the focus was for standalone bare metal provisioning.  But as we move more towards an application-framework, there are components in the app stack such as the database server that might only exist on a physical system for scalability and performance.  Operating within this mixed environment is a core requirement to deal with both non-production transient IT services as well as production apps with flexing and stringent service level agreements (SLA).

At Platform Computing, we are not cloud washing our products.  On top of being named the #1 vendor by Forrester, we received the Best of VMworld Finalist award for Private Cloud Management.

Were you there?  What were your takeaways?

Will the CIO allow the frog to be boiled?

What do you get when you combine a grass roots solution portfolio and adoption strategy with enterprise pricing schemes? Answer: A very attractive short-term value proposition that is sure to put many customers on the path to vCloud.

What’s the problem? Cost and vendor lock-in.

Cloud computing is the third major wave in the history of distributed computing and offers the promise of open systems enabling customer leverage through commodity IT components. However, incumbent vendors are fighting desperately to create integrated proprietary stacks that protect their core products and licensing models.

This battle for leverage between big vendors and customers comes down to a basic architectural decision: Does the CIO and senior architect team have an open systems vision for private cloud that they are willing to pursue in-spite of bundled offerings from vendors?

Platform Computing is betting that a large portion of the market will architect their private cloud platforms with heterogeneity and commodity as key principals.

Anyone who doubts that the frog is getting warm or that the intent for customer lock-in is real needs only to read Microsoft’s ad decrying vendor lock-in.

VMworld: A Strategy Straight out of Redmond?

Is the market doomed to a big orange, blue, or red cloud? Even if you won’t be attending VMworld this week in San Francisco, you can bet virtualization and clouds will be dominating the tech media and blogs throughout the course of the week.

We expect that VMware will announce plans to move up the stack and attempt to secure VM management customers into their evolving cloud platform. Platform won’t be attending VMWorld this year, and here’s why.

As we see it, there are four cloud computing camps currently forming:

1. VM camp – led by VMWare and other OS/VM vendors (Microsoft, Red Hat and Citrix) who believe clouds should be based on homogeneous OS/VM
2. Enterprise Management camp—led by the Big 4 enterprise management behemoths who are offering cloud portals tied to their existing management tools and acquiring components to keep their customers as they upgrade to cloud
3. Cloudy Server camp—these are the cloud-in-a-box systems vendors who suggest that building private clouds is as simple as a plug-and-play solution (It’s not! And it’s more than a commitment to a single hardware or software vendor)
4. Open Platform camp—promoted and built by customers who are intent on maintaining vendor leverage and avoiding lock-in. Platform Computing and other independents play here by working across the stack with an explicit heterogeneous strategy

Don’t get us wrong—each of these approaches is a legitimate path. However, when it comes to private clouds for medium and large enterprises, the risks of complexity, high cost and vendor lock-in become clear for the first three approaches. It’s here that the VM and Cloudy Server camps are better viewed as components and pools of standardized building blocks than the über-cloud (hardware + OS + VM + middleware + management, all from one-vendor!). Likewise, the Enterprise Management camp starts to look as complicated and expensive as the thing it was supposed to replace (itself!). We are told that we still need all their existing management tools plus some new functions and glues to build a cloud – just pay them more!

That’s not to say that the Open Platform approach is a panacea. But over time, it does deliver on a core promise of cloud that is to reduce vendor lock-in while commoditizing IT components.

The reason Platform won’t be at VMworld this year is that we want to make the statement that “clouds have no colors” and there is an alternative approach to either going big or legacy.

Integrated stacks are good and provide real value. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that when vendors control those stacks, they are both sticky and expensive. When customers own and control their stacks via heterogeneous open systems, they face integration issues, but in return, they get vendor leverage, great prices and commodity scale-out control. That’s the lesson that we’ve learned over the past 18 years and the core reason for our customer’s success.

We’re betting our business again on the open systems approach with cloud. A cloud management layer, such as Platform’s ISF product, allows companies to have private cloud in their own way and get value from an integrated, heterogeneous stack while also benefitting from the other promises of the cloud, such as automated provisioning, self-service, chargeback capabilities and workload management for a wide variety of applications across both VM and physical servers. And with solutions such as our Platform ISF Starter Pack companies can evaluate how a private cloud can work for them at low risk, low cost ($4995) and in a few days rather than months.

What color cloud do you want for your organization?

Getting Started with Private Cloud: Platform or Toolkit?

A new vendor coalition was announced this week, bringing together software from three vendors and an integrator to enable private cloud. You may be wondering what our take is on this announcement… Well, I can sum it up in one word: Difficult.

As James Staten of Forrester wrote in You’re not a cloud yet – get on the path today, private cloud will take quite some time for many organizations to deploy, and most firms are just getting started with private cloud research. As you get started into the world of private cloud do you really want to spend weeks and months cobbling together multiple toolkits just to see how it works in your environment? Or would you rather have an all-in-one platform that lets you get started quickly, with very small investment?

Platform engineered ISF to tackle all three toolkit approaches in a single software product--enabling self-service, application lifecycle automation and cloud elasticity. And with the Platform ISF Starter Pack we announced yesterday, you can get a sandbox environment up and running in just 30 minutes. For $4,995 you get software, best practices advice and help to set up private cloud – that includes a 1-year software license, training, cloud-builder consultation, and integration advice for your internal tools.

Based on our experience with users in the last year in private cloud, users are looking for a single solution they can get up and running quickly to help crystallize the requirements for their private cloud solutions. No messing around with multiple providers and disparate tools. No lengthy development and deployment projects just to get started. And when you’re ready to move forward with a private cloud deployment, Platform’s enterprise-class expertise and support will be with you every step of the way.

Staten recommends users begin investing now in cloud starter packs to better understand where they need to be down the road. With one all-in-one software product that provides everything you need for private cloud management, parting with less than $5,000 for tangible experience may be the best decision you make all year.

The Glue that Binds: Cloud Management Software and the 7 Key Components of Private Clouds – Part 2

As previously promised, this is a continuation to my earlier blog post on the seven main requirements for successful private cloud deployments, and will outline exactly how Platform’s private cloud management software supports all seven key components. For those of you that aren’t yet familiar with Platform’s ISF product, it’s our private cloud management software, which we introduced to the market in June 2009.

As organizations evaluate how to evolve their internal infrastructures to a private cloud, I want to clearly delineate how Platform ISF can facilitate this evolution:

1. Heterogeneous systems support – Adapters within the Platform ISF integrate distributed and heterogeneous IT resources to form a shared system. All major industry standard hardware, operating systems (including Linux and Windows) and VM hypervisors (including VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Red Hat KVM) are supported. Adapters are also available for provisioning tools (IBM xCAT, Symantec Altiris, and Platform Cluster Manager) to set up application environments on demand.
2. Integration with management tools – Platform ISF integrates with many third-party tools for various systems management tasks out-of-the- box, including directory services for user and account management, security, monitoring and alerting.
3. Configurable resource allocation policies – Once a pool of shared resources is formed, a set of site-specific sharing policies is configured in the allocation engine to ensure that applications receive the required resources. These policies also make certain that the organization’s resource sharing priorities are applied, and that the quota constraints applicable to business groups sharing the cloud are reinforced. The allocation engine matches IT resource supplies to their demands based on resource-aware and application-aware policies. This private cloud “brain” is critical for IT agility.
4. Integration with workload managers, middleware and applications – Platform ISF provides interfaces to users and applications as well as supporting the lifecycle of cloud service management. Templates can be configured for simple and complex N-tier business applications to automate their lifecycle management. Platform ISF allows for the starting of all the components of an N-tier application, the adding or removal of a resource, and monitoring and failure recovery. It also supports middleware such as J2EE, SOA, CEP and BPM, and workload schedulers such as AutoSys, Platform LSF and Symphony.
5. Support IT and business processes – A self-service portal enables users to request and obtain physical servers and VMs in minutes instead of days or weeks. Platform ISF has a set of APIs that can be called by applications, middleware and workload managers to request and return resources without human intervention. The service offerings can be structured as: complete application environments (e.g., application packages, CPU, memory, storage and networking); as bare metal servers with an operating system installed; or as virtual machines. SLAs can be associated with each service offering.
6. Extensible to external resources – Platform ISF integrates with many service provider environments (eg. Amazon Web Services via Amazon Virtual Private Cloud), enabling centralized access, management, tracking and billing of external services.
7. Enterprise, not workgroup, solution – Built on a technology foundation found in large scale production environments, Platform ISF is scalable to hundreds of thousands of cores under management which enables IT to start small and feel confident that their cloud will grow as more services are added over time.

Lastly, beyond the seven key components of enterprise cloud deployments, Platform ISF also collects all resource usage data and provides reports and billing information. Alternatively, the cloud administrator may choose to feed the usage data into site-specific reporting and charge-back tools.

Below I’ve included our depiction of the private cloud management stack and the location of Platform ISF with its various capabilities.

Multiple global datacenters => one virtual datacenter? I think not…

I was just reading Nick Heath’s article Private Cloud: Turning corporate datacentres into a global virtual machine posted on silicon.com about the potential of private cloud turning global datacenters into a massive, global VM, and it made me recall a somewhat-famous quote from Sun Microsystems on cloud from a couple of years back – to paraphrase: All enterprise IT will be run out of facilities hosted by a handful of service providers within the next decade. (I don’t remember the exact timeframe, but I do recall chuckling out loud when I read it).

Now this particular “global VM” article by Nick Heath wasn’t worthy of a chuckle, but--seriously? Who in their right mind would be entertaining a near-term strategy to string together all of their datacenter assets into a single shared resource pool, where apps and workloads could cross the pond(s) and back on a whim? Don’t get me wrong – this is a wonderful vision, with incredible economics of scale and efficiency behind it – but cloud computing is in its infancy and it still has significant political, data security, and financial reporting issues that need to be resolved before a monumental project such as this could be entertained.

When it comes to cloud computing, organizations of all sizes need to start small, either within a specific group (e.g. developers and testers of a BU) or class of apps (eg. stateless Java apps performing simple request/response). From there, they can get the kinks out, work the politics, figure out the chargeback models, etc. You could certainly implement this approach across multiple datacenters/geographies to support these teams/businesses now (some of our early adopters are doing just that), but not for the sake of having an über-global cloud.

You don’t need some science-fiction, futuristic cloud model to realize the economics of private cloud – a small bite will do.

Vote for Me and Platform at VM World 2010!!

VM World 2010 kicks off August 30 in San Francisco, and this year the conference is seeking “the wisdom of crowds” to set the agenda. The public gets to vote on which speakers they’d like to see, and yours truly - Platform’s CTO for HPC - is in the running with a session that will explore several paths that organizations can take to successfully support a private cloud. In what should prove to be a lively and informative discussion, I will demonstrate how enterprises can effectively match performance and reliability requirements to their computing workload, while mitigating some of the challenges and risks involved (such as security and control issues). Perhaps most illuminating, I’ll show how some of the real-world companies that Platform is working with are forging a path to the private cloud today, with each use case illustrating a unique approach. So if you’re interested in hearing more, please give me a big thumbs up at: http://www.vmworld.com/community/conferences/2010/cfpvote/. My session is being considered for the Private Cloud - Management track, and my session is listed towards the very bottom of the scroll list.

Voting is open until May 26, so please encourage your friends, colleagues, neighbors, partners, and customers to vote frequently and often so that I can see you all in San Francisco this August!