VMware Taking Fight To Amazon With Top-Secret Public Cloud Project

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VMware Taking Fight To Amazon With Top-Secret Public Cloud Project

VMware is building its own public cloud infrastructure, called VMware Public Cloud, in an effort to take on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Now, CEO Pat Gelsinger's call to arms makes sense.

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Shawn Douglass

VMware’s vendor lock-in and attempts to control the market are not new, and neither is the technology that they are talking about building here. In fact, Cloud Management Platforms are in production environments today that can move workloads from private to public clouds – all with a management “umbrella”, as Kevin describes, that provides policy-based governance across clouds, regardless of the service provider. Not only do these cloud management platforms help avoid vendor lock-in, but they help central IT measure and assess cloud service provider quality as measured by their ability to consistently meet SLAs. Purpose-built from the ground up, as opposed to a Franken-monster built from disparate technology solutions, native CMPs should be on every IT organization’s radar who is considering moving from private to public cloud. For examples, view our case studies: http://www.servicemesh.com/resources/take-aways/
- Shawn Douglass, CTO ServiceMesh

twessels

Well, VMware is the established player in data center workload virtualization and management. Lots of customers spent lots of money with VMware over the past decade. Along came AWS in 2006 with EC2. AWS has also added a whole bunch of additional services since then and makes routine price cuts. VMware ignored the public cloud because it wasn't affecting them in their "ownership" of enterprise workloads. Now AWS feels like it is good enough to court enterprise customers and their workloads. This is why the WMware execs had a collective panic attack at the recent VMware Partner Exchange. AWS is going to ruin their business model. Now this process could take a long time, and VMware is not likely to standby and watch it happen. So now VMware wants to demonstrate, real soon now, that its customers can move their enterprise workloads from the data center to the VMware Public Cloud and presumably back to the data center using a hybrid cloud model. Will VMware be able to pull this off? I wouldn't bet against VMware, but they do seem to lack experience in operating warehouse-scale, public computing environments. Time will tell.

kmclaughlin_crn

Looks like VMware vs. Amazon is fast becoming the new VMware vs. Microsoft. Amazon just cut EC2 pricing by up to 27 percent, and it's interestingly timed, though it was probably not a reaction to the bluster from VMware execs at PEX. This is starting to get interesting!