Orange joins Cisco, EMC, VMware to form cloud computing alliance

In what is clearly the biggest news story of the week it's reported today that Orange Business Systems, the network service provider and mobile operator, is to provide the billing know-how for the 'pay as you go' cloud offering from the increasingly borg'd industry triumvirate of Cisco, EMC and VMware.

The Flexible 4 Business Alliance expands on the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition that Cisco, EMC and VMware established early last year and allows them to deliver complete Cloud Solutions.

EMC has clearly learned some valuable lessons from the closure of it's Atmos Cloud service in July this year:

1) If you make hardware that allows people to build Clouds, stick to the knitting.

2) Work with people you trust to deliver integrated offering - it's an open secret EMC & Cisco are engaged.

3) You need specialist expertise to collect the money - Like Amazon, Orange has extremely efficient microbilling capability

I predict this will be a great success amongst Global organisations and governments who want their own private cloud infrastructures, and for service providers looking for a one stop shop for the delivery of what will become core infrastructure.

European IT Managers cool about Cloud

In February this year Computer Associates released an interesting report titled ‘Unleashing the Power of Virtualisation 2010_Cloud Computing and the Perceptions of European Business’ rather long title but actually a very interesting survey I would recommend downloading a copy from here. The survey covered the attitudes to virtualisation and cloud computing at 550 IT managers in 14 European countries with 65% of those surveyed having over 3000 employees and the remainder between 1000 and 3000.

After several readings of the results conclusions I would draw is that the growing confidence that is coming from the rapid and successful rollout of virtualisation projects is pulling the Cloud concept up the adoption curve very quickly. Evidenced by the fact that was only 17% of European IT managers identified “Cloud Computing” has been transformational to their business 47% of them are adopting cloud type delivery models for internal ICT services.

It is quite clear that the delivery of internal Cloud environments facilitated by increasingly robust virtualisation technologies is seen by European IT managers as a way of regaining control of the corporate computer environment thereby forcing down runaway IT costs that are widely acknowledged as a drag on the bottom line.

HYPER-V Support for Red Hat Linux paves way for ISVs to migrate away form VMWare

A while back Microsoft suprised some in the industry by taking the unusually pragmatic approach of supporting the Novell SUSE Linux under Hyper-V. This week they have gone a step further by extending suport to one of the most common commercial Linux platforms Red Hat a platform that was often pitched as the successor to Windows Server.

Really this should come as no surprise - Microsoft are secure in their market position. According to IDC in the tail end of 2009 over 50% of servers delivered as a VM or virtualised workload were Microsoft Windows Server 2008, and I don;t see Citrix doing a lot of Apple Desktop virtualisation, it's all Windows. By expanding the range of supported guest OS's and giving it away for free, Microsoft will continue to take marketshare as organisations new to virtualisation (or not keen on spending on VMWare licenses) will undoubtedly try if not take the easy option.

By starting to support the linux community Microsoft are setting the stage. Making it easy to quickly expanding the number of ISV delivered applications for provisioning, management, HA, DR, security et al. that are needed to setup run a successful virtualised datacenter. Applications up to now only available for VMware

Microsoft have history here - in the mid '90's companies like FTP, Woolongong & Sunsoft had a very nice business selling TCP/IP stacks for PC's, until Microsoft introduced the Winsock API, which allowed every ISV with an terminal emulator or printing app to access Microsofts own free-to-download product - all three companies disappeared in one way or another over the next 4 years. I'd also contend that it led to the demise of Netscape - but that's another story.

So todays VMYak 'take-away' is - Remember, whilst VMware has hundreds of thousands of customers for VMWare - Microsoft has millions customers of Windows server out there. Windows Server is in almost every service provider, commercial organisation and public agency in world, and for them virtualization is just a free download away.

Myths about managing virtualised infrastructure

Interesting post by Rupert Collier, Product Manager for Visualization over at specialist distributor Computerlinks worth a read if you have a couple minutes;
Managing virtual environments: Common myths dispelled: discusses particularly the need not to manage virtualized and physical infrastructure separately from one another.Whilst on the surface this may sound contrary to the ideas of cloud computing, it is in fact Central to the delivery of cloud computing. In order to deliver an environment where virtual machines are able to be migrated seamlessly around it is essential that the underlying infrastructure runs like a Swiss watch, for whilst the infrastructure may be virtualised, adaptive and self healing you can guarantee that when something goes badly wrong the problem will be physical; RAM squeeze, CPU core failure, Network IO contentions or just simply the power going off...

Yep, all those things we lived with for the last 40yrs of business computing.

EMC Closes Cloud: Atmos'phere has changed says analyst

As they close almost without warning their Atmos storage cloud, it seems that EMC has woken to the fact that the cost of infrastructure in any telecommunications project is unbearable for a company that makes it's money from selling products. Read EMC announcement here.

The announcement is bad PR not just for EMC but for Cloud computing in general as it leaves customers in a position where they have no support, no service level agreement and no guarantees that their data will be there tomorrow!

If you have five minutes it's worth reading the critique by cloud blogger Nicole Hemsoth over at her Behind the Cloud blog where she takes to task the analyst who just a few months ago rated him seize Atmos storage cloud has one of the rising stars of Cloud Computing.

Having spent many years working for, or with, service providers of all types & sizes it's very clear to me that the financial model required to deliver Cloud computing environments runs counter to that of a hardware or software manufacturer no matter how big they are. Infrastructure is by definition “a massive upfront investment funded by debt paid back over many years that generates cash flow which is used to fund operations, pay back the debt and pay dividends to investors, which is about as far as you can get away from the model of a company that sells product.

You can't blame EMC for wanting to be at the forefront Cloud computing wave as is a defining period for the industry in which EMC is an undoubted leader, I think they have done the right thing in stepping back before it impacts their core business as I foresee that a number of other companies who have jumped too early with too little consideration of the financial model that needs to be employed following suit, or the conflicts of interest that may arise with customers who can 'do it better'.

My advice to anybody thinking of moving to cloud infrastructure is to proceed with caution:

1) Look at whether it is a core element of their business, is it what they do all day every day?
2) Look at the providers ability to sustain the business model; 'can they stand the level of long term' debt?

Do this “before” deciding who to trust your precious data to.

Breaking news: VMCo offers embedded Check Point VPN-1 VE security

Working together Virtual Machine Co and CheckPoint remove the final barrier to virtualization of enterprise-wide, tier-one computing. This is a new and unique offering

June 29, 2010 Cambridge, UK

Read more here

The Great Server-Centricity Con Job

Hardware today allows for higher and higher consolidation ratios “even if it is not our hardware”. More and more dense ram configurations are available but according to IDC the average number of VMs run on a single piece of physical hardware remains stubbornly at 'seven'.

Economics means we're incentivised to increase this ratio but fear stops us from doing so.

The concentration of risk that comes from the consolidation of more and more applications/ workloads/ services, call them what you will, onto fewer and fewer machines runs completely contrary to everything we have learnt to do in the last 20 years.

But, to our predecessors in the 80's and 90's this was considered normal everything ran on the Mainframe, a Couple of SuperMini's or on half a dozen VAXs.

What's happened is that we have been fooled into believing that the answer to needing to run a new application or service is to buy a new cheap server, and lets face it it's never been cheaper to buy servers - it's the spiraling cost of running them that is killing us!!

Do you think that the major Cloud providers are using 10's of thousands of those hot little 2CPU 16GB systems that DELL & HP are shoving down everyones throats?

No, they are built on RAM heavy, massively scalable 'custom designed hardware' with 'custom designed' capacity management software. With, of course, 'custom designed support'.

Just what we're offering to you, everyday... only with the Virtual Machine Company it's our standard design..!