7 Vendors To observe At Cloud Connect Chicago 2013

(click image for larger view)

On Wednesday, Oct. 23, i will have the risk to debate the present cloud stack wars with proponents of 3 different stacks at Cloud Connect Chicago. While many carriers and providers mix virtualization and orchestration tools, these three organizations are aligned with three distinct technology stacks:

— HP has embraced OpenStack strongly, and i will be joined by Monty Taylor.

— Verizon Terremark has a big role in CloudStack deployments, and Jim Anthony may be participating.

— VMware has its own suite of virtualization and cloud tools for both private and non-private environments, which Mathew Lodge could be ready to speak to.

a number of weeks ago, I postulated that today’s cloud platforms are in a race corresponding to that of operating systems a number of decades ago. Greg DeKoenigsberg of Eucalyptus posted a super rebuttal, wherein he speculated that, if cloud stacks are operating systems, my analysis “would make Eucalyptus the open source little brother that the System/360 never had, that has no analogue within the history books, and which could have changed everything.”

[ Seeking to explain disruptive technology to colleagues? First rule: Don’t speak about disruptive technology. Read more: Disruptive Technology: Follow Fight Club Rules. ]

Finally this discussion, I’m wanting to tackle how a few of these cloud platforms are competing with each other. i have a protracted list of questions, some interested by where private cloud tools mostly are headed, and a few specific to every stack. i hope we’ll get to at the least some of them on stage during our discussion.

Listed below are a number of my generic questions on how clouds are evolving:

— Is the Amazon Web Services API the equivalent of Cisco’s command line interface? How important it’s for a cloud platform to be semantically compatible with AWS?

— Who’s the actual customer in an enterprise? Is it the CIO, or are you selling on to a line of commercial? In other words, are you an enabler of shadow IT?

— VMware is developing its own storage tech (vSAN), but primarily expects monolithic vBlock/Flexpod converged solutions. CloudStack is storage agnostic, creating other forms of storage from a storage system. OpenStack is less so, including SWIFT as a co-founding project. Why are there such a lot of different approaches to storage?

— Large fortunes were spent acquiring software defined networking technology for clouds. How critical is it that every cloud stack has its own SDN technology, and the way will this be used to distinguish offerings? How will users avoid lock-in when the virtualization, network stack and storage are all from the identical cloud “OS”?

— Gartner says “developers drive public IaaS purchasing.” Why is private cloud purchasing being driven by IT?

— Two cloud stacks aren’t here on stage with us. What do you guys you have got Microsoft (considered by Gartner to shortly be #2 to AWS and which has a robust private cloud play) and Eucalyptus (the little cloud startup which could) and their roles within the coming stack wars?

I even have questions for specific stack proponents. These aren’t very friendly, but it’s my job as moderator to spot the chinks within the armor and ask the awkward questions I hear day-to-day from IT professionals with whom I discuss the way forward for clouds.

Questions For VMware’s Mathew Lodge

— Your product started so one can consolidate multiple idle machines, then moved into QC and a discount of moves, adds, and changes, and is now about data center automation. In that journey, you’ve inquisitive about what IT operations and the CIO want. How are you adjusting that vision to incorporate what end users and developers are after?

— VMware was so dominant within the virtualization industry that I’ve had many IT professionals tell me, “i’ve a cloud” once they, as a matter of fact, have virtual machines. Has your earlier success lulled IT right into a false sense of complacency concerning the importance of a service-centric IT strategy?

— Orchestration platforms like CloudStack and OpenStack can manage you from above; Microsoft’s Hyper-V is putting on pressure with a public/private solution; and open-source virtualization tools like KVM and Xen are undermining margins for pure virtualization. As cloud stacks go open source, how do you respond?

— The brand new vCloud hybrid service puts you in competition with VMware partners and cloud providers who’ve built public offerings to your stack. What provoked this variation? How have you ever handled the resulting channel conflict?