I just saw that VMware had invested in fast-rising cloud service provider - and 3PAR customer, Terremark. I think this is an astute move by VMware, both as an economic investment in an early market leader, but also as a means to increase the strategic technology relationship between the two companies.
Terremark's Enterprise Cloud could is an excellent example of what the future of cloud, or utility computing will be. People who think cloud computing is just the next great forgotten buzzword should take a look at what Terremark is delivering. Its a way for their customers to run their applications using only the compute, storage and network resources they need. It is the model of information infrastructure efficiency
They certainly have impressive technology though I was surprised when we talked to them a couple of months ago that they based their storage charges on purely the amount of disk space, no method for tracking I/O. I hear they have big 3PAR arrays so maybe I/O just isn't a concern yet so they haven't had to do it.
Their UI integration with the load balancers and firewalls is very cool indeed.
They didn't sound like they had a lot of extra capacity laying around though, when we talked to them they seemed to indicate our requirements would have them dedicate several systems to our needs, potentially giving a longer lead time to ramp up capacity. I suppose it's a chicken and egg problem, they probably don't want to spend hundreds of millions on capacity without customers and some customers may not be able to get the true value of the cloud without having all of that excess capacity at hand on demand instantly.
That's certainly where Amazon's cloud offerings seem to shine, though in every other respect I think Amazon's cloud offerings aren't as good.
Makes me wonder if HP would get into the cloud service provider game at some point, since they obviously can get hardware at the lowest pricing for internal use. IBM already has data services and co-location though I don't recall hearing anything cloud like coming out of them.
One thing I would like to see is a billing model that's similar to bandwidth usage, allowing users to burst over their limits for periods of time. I've read that vSphere 4 is supposed to integrate a bunch of new billing things into it so perhaps they'll have something like that soon.
Posted by: nate | May 26, 2009 at 04:34 PM
Excellent insights, as usual, Nate - thanks for the comment.
Posted by: marc farley | May 26, 2009 at 04:48 PM
Terremark took the stage with Maritz at VMworld EMEA as a vCloud partner, they were joined by some guys from Engine Yard who use Terremark as their provider if I recall.
Interesting deal, I'll have to scan the trades tomorrow for anything beyond the boiler plate in the press releases.
It's a small deal for VMware but instead of building their own cloud provider I think they've just rented one to encourage others to get on the bus.
Posted by: Storagezilla | May 26, 2009 at 07:56 PM
It will be interesting to see if they make investments in other cloud services companies - I expect they will.
Posted by: marc farley | May 26, 2009 at 11:21 PM