Virtually Insane?

I have seen a massive uptake of talk about cloud computing and offerings from the likes of Amazon with its EC2 service. Anyone not familiar with Cloud computing for a simple description it basically is a service provider providing a metered usage of server instance within the hosting companies server environment. EC2 for example only charge for what you use, so you can turn off your machine overnight and not be charged etc.

I recently attended an event on Cloud computing in London which gave a great insight into how cloud is being used across various organisations and environments from small startups who cannot afford to host web farms through to given examples such as the New York times newspaper utilising the "Cloud" over a weekend to scan all of its archives http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/01/self-service-prorated-super-computing-fun/.

The assumption

Those who are involved within the virtual space who have not been under a stone for the last month would know that VMware have recently appointed Paul Martiz as there new CEO. He apparently brings a massive wealth of experience on Cloud Computing and I can't but help think and assume that the recent announcement this week about a new Datacentre purchase http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/Jul/28/vmware_plans_major_data_center_in_wenatchee.html Is evidence to suggest they are planning some big changes in how they offer virtual services.

Remember the Hypervisor is now "free" as in you can download ESXi for nothing, regardless of the fact you need to purchase various components such as VMotion, DRS and HA the underlying Hypervisor is "free".

It will definately be interesting to see if any announcements come out of VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas in September on the future strategy of VMware and Cloud computing, it will definately be a area of business that VMware needs to adapt and start competing against, they have a huge amount of development teams that can provide the management components required to manage VM's remotely within a cloud so it will be interesting to see if my assumptions become correct and VMware does start to turn into a ASS (as a service) organisation :)

Labels: cloud, paul maritz, vmware

# posted by Daniel Eason : 23:32