SiliconANGLE » rackspace

Rackspace Open-Sources A Node.js Library for Creating and Parsing XML Documents

Alex Williams — Wed, 09 May 2012 16:32:29 +0000

The issues that come with connecting the legacy enterprise to the cloud mean dealing with heavyweight technologies such as XML. To that end, Rackspace developers have built and open-sourced a library for creating XML documents called “node-elementtree,” a Node.js Library to build and parse XML documents.

Tomaz Muraus writes on the Rackspace blog that none of the developers really care for XML but they have to support it as some of its API customers still use it. They prefer JSON instead, the chosen lightweight service for developers everywhere.

The need for node-elementtree came as Rackspace started building out a monitoring-as-a-service (MaaS) platform. As more data moves to cloud environments there is an interdependency that IT needs to understand. MaaS is intended to help in that effort.

Rackspace developers found that there wasn’t a good library available for creating XML documents. So the team decided to build their own.

The group decided to model its library on the Python-based ElementTree, an API for parsing XML. According to the Python.org site, the Element Tree API “is a flexible container object, designed to store hierarchical data structures in memory.”

The Rackspace blog post provides examples for creating and parsing XML documents.

Rackspace uses node-elementtree for MaaS in two places:

1. Sending usage documents to an Atom Hopper instance
2. Returning a response to the API user which has requested a response format to be XML

In the second case we actually use it in combination with our validation and serialization framework called Swiz. We use Swiz to define field types and validators for every object in the system. When a user hits our API and requests XML, Swiz serializes the response using the object definition and node-elementtree library.

Rackspace has in recent months also contributed Whiskey, a Node.js test framework and the Cassandra CQL driver, a driver for Node.js.

There is a recognition that XML has to be dealt with as API customers still use it. node-elementtree offers a modern way to build and parse XML documents in an environment more friendly to a new generation of developers.

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In the same vein:

Re-Invent Cloud Computing with IBM Solutions [Video]

Saroj Kar — Fri, 04 May 2012 17:19:45 +0000

Randy Arseneau, Platform Strategy Consultant at IBM responsible for go-to market strategy formulation, global storage platform sales enablement, portfolio positioning and analyst relations, stopped theCube not too long ago to give his take on the future of cloud computing. He also discussed IBM’s role in the cloud, and the growing concerns around security. He shared his insight with Wikibon.org founder Dave Vellante (see full video below).

Arseneau expressed his view on the future of cloud computing in response to Vellante’s perspective on industry adoption of cloud computing. Going by the latest signs, “we believe 2012 is going to the year of the cloud,” Arseneau says. The cloud is going to be become the standard mechanism for the delivering and consumption of information.”

On his company role in providing cloud services to industries, Arseneau said IBM is capable of designing systems to bring the benefits of cloud computing while avoiding the security and risk for small, medium to large sized businesses.

“IBM thinks cloud is fundamentally about very efficient, very agile, easy to provision, easy to manage, scalable, cost effective infrastructure that can be adapted at very granular level, can be optimized for workload, policy driven across wide user cases and workload and can be managed very easily.”

Arseneau noted that early cloud adopters were not very knowledgeable and most believed public cloud services from companies like Amazon, Rackspace and others were commercial and consumer oriented platforms that lack security, aren’t scalable and are tedious to implement. But with the evolution of the technology, people’s mindsets are changing.

The interview then turned to the concerns on security of cloud computing, a key concern for businesses looking to adopt cloud tools and services.

Looking at an IBM initiative to solve this problem, Arseneau note’s Big Blue’s expertise in introducing new technology, and is now providing the “best and most comprehensive” cloud service offerings to date. IBM is now offering enterprises of all sizes a way to host enterprise-class, cost-saving and security-rich cloud solutions that aide in business growth and productivity.

IBM plays a major role as cloud architectures and usage models. For one, IBM SmartCloud allows users to create, update, maintain and even scale an enterprise-wide system in a cost effective way without the need to purchase new hardware. And the new PureApplications System provides more automation for the network based computing devices.

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This Week in the Cloud: Rackspace, Big Data and Titanium 2.0

Maria Deutscher — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 19:40:23 +0000

This week in the cloud was a fairly unusual one, in that we have seen not one but three big announcements marketing the convergence of at least two trends in the cloud.

First up is Rackspace’s news. The web host revealed a massive commitment to OpenStack, an initiative it conceived only two years, by migrating its flagship services to the platform. In 24 months OpenStack managed to build an ecosystem with hundreds of partners, produce five different versions and become one of the largest cloud companies’ solution of choice.

The update stirred a lot of buzz, and not just from the blogosphere. Several companies jumped on the bandwagon, including Nicria and Infochimps. The latter announced right off the bat that a huge chunk of its big data portfolio – its management, provisioning and visualization offerings – support OpenStack, and as a result, the Rackspace Cloud.

The third item comes from Appcelerator, the mobile development solutions maker. It launched the second version of its popular Titanium platform, with the biggest addition being a new tool that saves web developers a lot of time. It does that by automating a big portion of the backend coding that goes along with writing an app. Titanium 2.0 just so happens to support all the major frameworks and languages, with a cross-platform API due to arrive in a few months’ time.

Last but not least is the personal cloud news from Hewlett-Packard, which is also getting involved with mobile. The company is targeting the enterprise with two new products that complement each other - an app management console and testing environment, in addition to a data manager that allows employees to access corporate information more effectively.

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In the same vein:

Nicira Latest to Join Rackspace-OpenStack Buzz

Maria Deutscher — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 17:00:50 +0000

Yesterday cloud host Rackspace crossed a fairly major milestone, and the same can be said of the OpenStack initiative that kicked off just two years ago. The company said that the Rackspace Cloud service is now powered by the open cloud OS, a move that is already proving to be a very significant one for the ecosystem.

Nicira is one of the companies involved in this push and can be partially credited with the creation of Cloud Networking, a new VLAN-as-a-service. The offering is based on OpenStack Quantum, a so-called vSwitch component, and Nicira’s Network Virtualization Platform (NVP). The latter connects to the platform via a plug-in.

“Nicira not only makes truly flexible multi-tenant clouds possible, it makes the economics incredibly compelling,” said John Engates, chief technology officer at Rackspace.

“Combining our award-winning Fanatical Support(R) with OpenStack Quantum and Nicira, we can now deploy and configure a secure private network and fully-featured cloud in seconds, a promise that is very powerful for enterprises large and small.”

OpenStack is in the center of the open-source cloud trend, and as the brainchild of Rackspace and NASA, this joint effort is what eventually what put this vision on the table. The difference between now and two years ago adds up to several generations of the software and a few hundred partners, including Infochimps.

This particular tidbit is notable thanks to the fact Infochimps managed to release an announcement of its own right after Rackspace’s big update. The big data firm said it has extended API-based support to the OpenStack-powered cloud services across a big chunk of its portfolio. That includes the Infochimps Platform, the Dashpot virtualization layer that’s designed to run on top of it, and the Ironfan provisioning tool.

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In the same vein:

Infochimps an Early Supporter of OpenStacked RackSpace Cloud

Maria Deutscher — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 13:40:43 +0000

Big data marketplace operator (and app maker) Infochimps is now up-to-date with two of the most buzzed-about trends in IT.

This week Rackspace announced that about two years after it fired up the OpenStack project with the support of NASA and a few others, their Rackspace Cloud – the company’s flagship service – is now powered by the young project. In that two-year period OpenStack has seen a total of five releases and hundreds of partners.

The cloud OS’s achievement list managed to grow even longer immediately after Rackspace’s announcement, when Infochimps revealed it now supports the former’s hosting service via the OpenStack API. This is another push on behalf of the Hadoop ecosystem into the cloud; the big data munching engine can now be deployed on yet another platform (see the video here).

“Rackspace customers running the new OpenStack-based Rackspace Cloud Servers can quickly and easily spin up Hadoop clusters to power their big data applications in as little as 20 minutes with a single command using the Infochimps Platform. With the power of Ironfan, Infochimps’ open source provisioning tool, and Dashpot, Infochimps’ visualization and operations dashboard, customers can easily monitor and manage their Big Data operations on an ongoing basis, or leave it to Infochimps to manage it on the Rackspace Cloud for them.”

Dashpot is a pretty new addition to Infochimps’ portfolio. It was launched just last week, dubbed as a tool that runs on top of Platform and supplements it with the addition of several elements. Among these are some pretty extensive (real-time) visualization features that make data available in a simplified format far and beyond just the IT department. In addition, Dashpot also rounds out usability and cloud management in the admin panel, making itself a welcomed addition there as well.

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In the same vein:

OpenStack Foundation Gets Funded With Help From AT&T, HP, IBM and More

Matt Weinberger — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 21:01:50 +0000

In a move to build buzz ahead of next week’s OpenStack Conference here in San Francisco, eighteen major technology companies have announced their intent to become paying members of the OpenStack Foundation, the open source cloud platform’s governing body. AT&T, Canonical, HP, IBM, Nebula, Rackspace, Red Hat, and SUSE will become Platinum members once the foundation launches, while Cisco, ClearPath, Cloudscaling, Dell, DreamHost, ITRI, Mirantis, Morphlabs, NetApp, and Piston Cloud Computing will be Gold.

Previously, project co-founder Rackspace Hosting was picking up OpenStack’s tab, which the official wiki places at around between $4 and 5 million dollars annually. But the OpenStack Foundation is seeking to raise around that same amount from these new members ($500,000/year from Platinum members, .025% of annual revenues with a minimum of $20,000 and a maximum of $500,000 from Gold members), taking governance further out of Rackspace’s hands and putting it back with the community.

All eighteen of these members have a proven commitment to the OpenStack platform, with each a code contributor to last week’s major “Essex” release. Needless to say, they all plan on continuing to add their expertise to OpenStack in the future.

The OpenStack Foundation is still a more-or-less hypothetical body: These first confirmed members will take point on the legal issues around creating specific bylaws based around the existing general framework, with draft charters up for community review as the process goes on.

The goal is to have a charter ratified by both the Rackspace Board and the OpenStack Community before the end of the third quarter of 2012. Oh, and an important side-note: You don’t have to be a multi-million dollar corporation to vote, and OpenStack Foundation membership is free for individuals.

In what some pundits are already starting to call a “war” between OpenStack and the recently open-sourced Apache CloudStack project (I remain to be convinced of any meaningful competition between the two), this kind of financial support is a major edge. And it goes a long way towards freeing the project from what some industry-watchers see as Rackspace’s iron grip.

But I’m hopeful that the funding and the support can accelerate OpenStack’s maturity cycle quickly enough that we start to see some real enterprise adoption (HP Converged Cloud notwithstanding) sooner rather than later, or else the growing popularity of proprietary clouds like Amazon EC2 could end this party before it’s begun.

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In the same vein:

3 Reasons Why a VMware/Rackspace Acquisition Would be Bad for Customers

Klint Finley — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 20:14:48 +0000

Rumors have surfaced again that someone is trying to buy Rackspace. This time, according to The VAR Guy, rumors have been floating around that VMware is considering purchasing Rackspace to neutralize the perceived threat that the OpenStack project poses to VMware’s vSphere and vCloud. It’s not the first time acquisition rumors have floated, Dell is often cited as a suitor, but as The VAR Guy notes, Rackspace has always said it’s not for sale.

The VAR Guy doesn’t think a VMware acquisition of VMware is likely. First of all, Rackspace doesn’t control OpenStack – there are over 100 different companies now behind the project. And possibly more importantly, VMware would end up competing with many of its existing cloud service partners. Combined with Rackspace’s general resistance to acquisitions, I have to agree it’s unlikely. But I can’t dismiss the possibility out of hand because:

1) VMware has been investing in its own public cloud offering with the Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service. Meanwhile, Amazon Web Serivces has been expanding its own PaaS-like offering Elastic Beanstalk. AWS is building out its PaaS capabilities, but VMware has no public infrastructure-as-a-service offering.

2) Although there is now a huge number of companies supporting OpenStack, Rackspace has always been the most important company behind the project. Now that Citrix seems to be turning its back on the project, the project is vulnerable despite large companies like HP and AT&T paying lip service to OpenStack. As John Furrier has pointed out, signing on to support OpenStack doesn’t necessarily mean that much.

3) Let’s face it: it wouldn’t be the first time a vendor has gone into competition with its service partners.

4) Despite its leadership’s opposition to a takeover, Rackspace’s status as a public company means anything is possible.

I doubt this acquisition will happen, and I hope it doesn’t. It would be bad for customers in a number of ways.

First Things First

Why does Rackspace matter to the CIO? Today many CIOs are considering moving to the public cloud to curb their CAPEX costs, but the real advantage may be in the ability to more easily deliver applications to mobile workers. Either way, there remain risks involved: such as security, availability and compliance.

Rackspace is a leading provider of public cloud services, and VMware is a major provider of the underlying software that goes into making cloud architectures. Major changes for either vendor could have a big affect on the marketplace that trickles down to customers thinking about making the jump to the cloud.

AWS/Vmware Duopoly

There are plenty of PaaS and IaaS vendors out there besides AWS, Rackspace and Cloud Foundry. But AWS currently seems to take the lion’s share of IaaS business, and hosts a huge number of third party PaaS services. Rackspace seems to hold its own IaaS market, and could be considered AWS’ closest competitor. Meanwhile, VMware takes the lion’s share of the hypervisor market and is a player in the emerging PaaS market. A VMware/Rackspace combination would be a formidable force in the market, and would make it harder for Joyent et al. to compete. That could lead to even more consolidation and less competition. That means higher prices and less favorable SLAs for CIOs.

Less Competition for the Open Cloud

Make no mistake: Rackspace pulling out of OpenStack would be very bad for the project. It might not be enough to kill OpenStack altogether, but it would definitely hobble it. And if Rackspace left the project, would Dell and Canonical stick around or move to Plan B? Plan B for Dell would very likely be VMware, and Eucalyptus for Canonical.

Since Eucalyptus is now partnered with Amazon Web Services it could prematurely become the de facto standard for open cloud infrastructures if OpenStack is out of the picture. There’s still hope in Joyent’s SmartDataCenter and Citrix’s CloudStack, and with the market so young it would be a shame for one project to gain a monopoly before the its competitors have a chance to gain traction.

In essence, if vendors standardize on a less favorable solution, CIOs are stuck paying for it and supporting it, or building something else in house.

Migration Pains

Rackspace’s Linux servers run on Xen. If VMware acquired Rackspace it would likely want to migrate servers to VMware, which could not only cause service disruptions but also raise costs for Rackspace customers.

Customers weren’t happy when Rackspace merged Slicehost into Rackspace Cloud. I can only imagine how customers will react to being forced out of Rackspace into some new VMware IaaS.

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In the same vein:

The New School of Storage: Scality Rides the Unstructured Data Wave

Alex Williams — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 18:44:09 +0000

The new school of storage is like any new artistic genre or intellectual movement. It grows out of organic disruption. It’s the offshoot of chaos, having its own impact on our culture and way of life. For our purposes, data is the disruptor. The chaos is in the technology stack and the innovators are the upstarts of the new school of storage.

Disruption tends to surface the ugly side of who we are. The older, more established players will often hide their illnesses and appeal to the power barons. The young turn to the community. The trick is to build a community who know the old way may work but would prefer to adopt something new that is relevant to today’s workloads. Get enough momentum and the strategy can prove disruptive in itself. Succeed and you will most likely get acquired. If lucky, your technology will become a standard for the market.

The Scality Approach

Scality is a two-year-old startup that represents this new school of storage. They appeal to the early adopters, the ones who want to learn about the new stuff and are willing to buy it, too.

The trick for Scality? Patience and persistence. It will take years to mature before the most advanced storage systems see wide scale adoption.

Scality has to take this approach. Just look at its latest news. It’s exciting and new. And that’s the problem. Most IT buyers don’t want to to buy the exciting and new storage technology.

Scality’s technology cuts to the heart of the issue that companies face with unstructured data. As Scality points out in its news, unstructured data now represents the bulk of storage required by service providers and large enterprises. At the current pace, unstructured data will soon reach 80% of all storage requirements.

Scality’s organic ring storage creates a “distributed, dynamic table that scales by placing the data in containers that are not constrained by the limitations of file-based storage systems.” The system, according to the company, scales and adapts to different storage requirements. Scality executives see this as similar to the way organic systems adapt and replenish themselves. It’s designed to fail, a hallmark of Web scale systems. With Scality, the applications continue to function when servers fail. The load is distributed elsewhere to different parts of the ring storage network.

With RING Organic Storage 4.0, Scality is furthering its claim that distributed storage will replace network attached storage (NAS) as the need for scale continues to grow.

Scality CEO Jérôme Lecat says it can handle hot data, deliver a cost of ownership comparable with Web infrastructures and a management system far simpler than NAS.

Enterprise Strategy Group had this to say :

Until now, object storage could deliver the scalability, but not the performance. Standard response times for object-based storage are in the hundreds of milliseconds to full seconds, much too slow for today’s cloud-based services. In comparison, ESG testing demonstrated that Scality object storage on Intel Xeon servers equipped with Intel Enterprise SSDs and low-latency 10GbE network environment delivers 4-10 millisecond performance—10 times faster than other scale-out systems. The Scality solution delivers scalable object storage in which performance is never a barrier. Users can solve any performance problem with this architecture just by selecting the right number and types of server nodes and disk.

The demands that data places on an infrastructure means companies of all varieties are re-examining their storage needs and looking at new technologies like those from Scality.

Wikibon Co-Founder David Floyer made the point in an interview yesterday that persistent storage will be the most pressing issue over the next four to five years for IT buyers. The enti

re stack is changing. Apple, Microsoft and other massive device makers are forcing shifts. x86 processors or ARM – which will be most important? Apps are at the center of the battle with their proliferation and huge appetite for data.

All of this change means a huge opportunity for companies like Scality and the rest, including Caringo, Clever Safe and fresh entrants such as Basho, which recently introduced Riak CS, a new software platform for building multitenant cloud storage systems. The big guns like EMC Atmos Nirvanix, Dell, Amazon Web Services S3 and Rackspace Cloud Files also play in this market as does Gluster, the open-source startup acquired last year by Red Hat, now known as Red Hat Storage.

These companies all have an opportunity, considering the massive influx of big data and the impact it has on how companies keep their data, share it, integrate into apps to do analysis or otherwise.

“The change in the stack is profound,” Floyer said.

Scality is designed for consumer services. Time Warner Cable is building out on Scality to manage its email infrastructure. Email storage is not rocket science. Most of it is archiving. But it is also one of the most demanding of applications due to its unstructured nature. An email can be very small, a few kilobytes in size or very big as in a 20 megabyte attachment. People expect real-time results that can’t be had with a SAN as effectively as they can get with distributed storage that horizontally scales. TWC has more than one petabyte of data. It is growing 40% a year. For TWC, it just became economically impractical to store email on high-end SAN machines.

Lecat says the company wins these kinds of deals by connecting with communities that understands the innovations that come with distributed storage. And these are early days in the market. In Lecat’s view, the shift will take ten years. It is just the beginning of that shift so it makes no sense to waste time with people conditioned over the past 20 years to believe that storage products from EMC or NetApp are the only answer.

But many enterprise and storage architects will go with the technology they know so well. It may not make sense to invest in legacy storage technology. But often these customers have long established relationships with well-known providers. And these providers have massive marketing budgets to convince their customers that they need to invest in the cloud and other buzz words.

“Our technology is very different than what EMC or or VCE does.” Lecat said. “What we do from a market standpoint – we find these people that realize that EMC is not giving them the entire picture.”‘

An EMC spokesperson declined to comment for this story.

Still Not Cool Enough?

But is Scality next generation enough? Dreamhost is spinning out its storage technology into a separate company. The storage technology is based on Ceph, a new distributed file system developed by Dreamhost Founder Sage Weil. Ceph is getting considerable attention and is being discussed as an alternative replacement for OpenStack Swift storage.

The 451 Group published a short report about Ceph late last month. It cited Ceph’s scale-out architecture and its ability to provide file, block and object storage. It is expected to attract interest from service providers and enterprise providers looking to build out cloud storage services. The Ceph software has attracted a fairly large following for its flexibility and scalability.

Companies like Parallels Software are looking at Ceph as an alternative to Scality, which is perceived by some as a first generation technology in the vein of Amazon S3.

“Scality is a first generation of public storage,” said James Bottomley, CTO of Server Virtualization for Parallels. “It realistically looks like s3 storage. The main problem we see is it does not support sufficient updating of the objects of the image in a virtualized environment.”

But when pressed, Bottomley said this is something that no one company can claim has a clear advantage. Scality may lack that capability but so does most of the competition.

As 451 points out, the growing success of Amazon’s S3 and EBS cloud storage services is putting pressure on service providers and enterprises to build out their own offerings.

But the greater challenge? Having the patience and persistence to drive its presence in the market by connecting with early adopters.

Challenges for the The New School

The members of the new school of storage face a challenge. And that’s convincing the market that data in itself has a value of one.

Shared data? As Floyer points out, the value of data scales the more you share. Your data sets go far further when aggregated with data sets from other organizations. It’s far richer in scope.

“You need apps that can manage vast amounts of data,” Floyer said. “Object storage becomes central to that.”

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In the same vein:

Citrix Gives Cloudstack to the Apache Software Foundation and Turns its Back on OpenStack

Alex Williams — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 12:00:35 +0000

Citrix is turning Cloudstack over to the Apache Software Foundation and aligning closely with Amazon Web Services in a move that will force the very green OpenStack movement to take another look at its governance model.

The move by Citrix is a coup of sorts for AWS. The companies have no official partnership but Citrix will make Cloudstack fully compatible. Citrix move will force the entire market to consider if it should open its cloud infrasrtucture to the Seattle book purveryor turned server rental titan. That means Microsoft, VMware and any other service provider will need to consider this if they want to be a player with AWS in a market worth billions if not trillions in revenues.

The irony is rich, isn’t it? Enterprise and public cloud services providers have obsessed over the past two years about differentiating from AWS. And now they may have no choice but to align with them.

Citrix acquired Cloud.com last year and changed it into what is now Cloudstack. It makes grandiose claims about its deployments – tens of thousands of servers, billions in revenues from the customers that have deployed it. But its future is with AWS. It will be 100% complaint with the AWS infrastructure.

Citrix will remain somewhat active in OpenStack with support for virtualization and networking. But Project Olympus is dead. That was Citrix cloud infrastructure based on OpenStack that it announced last Spring.

Krishnan Subramanian is the founder of the newly launched Rishidot Research and a recognized expert in the still nascent cloud computing movement. He says the move adds momentum to standardizing around AWS. He believes the market is too young for standards, though, and therefore creates an imbalance.

The move also puts OpenStack on the defensive. It could force OpenStack to change its governance model and make the foundation more equitable

Rackspace launched OpenStack with NASA in 2010. By contributing its Swift storage technology, Rackspace had considerable influence. But without a foundation, there were soon questions about it being impartial. Rick Clark was one of the founding members and served as chief architect for OpenStack. He resigned after the OpenStack Governance model underwent changes without community participation.

In recent months, OpenStack has adopted a governance structure that critics say gives too much influence to the top tier contributors, leaving the smaller companies feeling like they lack a voice.

There have been technical concerns, too. To date, there have been no major OpenStack deployments. The clock is ticking.

Services Angle

This news affects every services provider on the planet. Citrix is unquestionably the underdog. As Randy Bias points out, Citrix spent $500 million on its investments in XenSource four years back and Cloud. com this past year cost it about $200 million. In the meantime, competitor Eucalyptus Systems has shown why it is winning. It rebuilt its infrastructure for high availability and fortified its partnership with AWS. Citrix had to do something. Aligning with AWS made the most sense. And it could be the difference if the OpenStack movement does not correct its governance issues.

The implications are even more significant for the outsiders looking in. OpenStack does not have an AWS API and so it has to depend on its developer community to build out a federated cloud. Neither VMware nor Microsoft have AWS APIs. Now they have to consider what to do.

The costs to build out cloud infrastructure can cost you plenty if you go with an enterprise cloud services provider. Go with AWS and it’s comparatively pennies on the dollar. It’s why OpenStack has to be an alternative. It’s role is critical right now. AWS has the potential to get too big and too dominating. To combat it, OpenStack has to do a better job of governance. If it can do that, then even the enterprise cloud services providers will win. They need an alternative to AWS for public cloud services that fit with private cloud offerings. If OpenStack doesn’t exist then they have no other options. And that does nothing for the overall health of the market.

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In the same vein:

Gartner Server Virtualization Trends: Competitors Threaten VMware’s Reign

Matt Weinberger — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 23:54:55 +0000

In a blog post, Gartner analyst Tom Bittman identifies the top server virtualization trends to watch out for in 2012 as the market matures. Short version: VMware’s dominance in this space is threatened as competitive choices mature and customers begin to fear the ramifications of getting locked into its ecosystem.

Here are Bittman’s points, distilled:

Competitive Choices Mature: Bittman doesn’t name names, but he does acknowledge that VMware’s competition in server virtualization is rapidly maturing, and that price is starting to become a key differentiator. In other words, virtualization environments like Citrix Xen, Microsoft Hyper-V and especially Red Hat KVM are catching up in both feature set and popularity to VMware vSphere. Enterprises currently using VMware for virtualization are unlikely to switch, but those who are just starting to look have an increasing number of completely valid options, and VMware is no longer as surefire a bet.
Second Sourcing Grows: Okay, so as I said, businesses aren’t moving away from VMware environments. But they are setting up second, internal virtualization environments and taking the competition for a test-drive to attempt to avoid putting all their eggs in one basket. There’s not much by way of multi-environment, heterogeneous virtualization management yet, but as this second sourcing trend grows, the interest in such a solution is as well.
Pricing Models in Flux: As the controversy over the VMware vSphere 5 licensing model in mid-2011 proved, there’s plenty of room for innovation in virtualization licensing schemes. That matter only gets worse as hybrid and private cloud deployments become more commonplace. Watch out for plenty of chatter around price models.
Penetration and Saturation: For a Gartner VP, it takes Bittman a while to get to a statistic: Virtualization is at 50% penetration, and competition is going to drive prices down and down. Conversely, as virtualization usage rises, server vendors are going to see a downtick in their own businesses until this trend slows down.
Cloud Service Providers Are Placing Bets: IaaS vendors are fully aware of this virtualization trend, and are scrambling to make their own infrastructures compatible with desirable host environments so that businesses can on-ramp virtualized workloads to their clouds. The options for a cloud service provider, as Bittman sees it, are to either build your own (limiting appeal), buy into the virtualization technology used by enterprises (risking commoditization) or invest in tools that connect the two (which could get complex). And these cloud providers are starting to make their investments. For instance, Rackspace uses Citrix Xen and XenServer for its cloud server instances, while Verizon subsidiary Terremark has thrown in with VMware vSphere.

Services Angle

As Bittman himself notes in the conclusion to his blog entry, just because the market is maturing doesn’t mean it’s done shaking up. There’s going to be some turmoil, and I’m sure some melodrama, as cloud service providers continue to throw in with one vendor or another for server virtualization. It would behoove the CIO to pay attention to the market, and, as ever, make choices based on actual value and not the name on the box.

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