VMware vCloud Event with Paul Maritz
Published on 1 Sep 2009 · Filed in Liveblog · 564 words (estimated 3 minutes to read)This special event with Paul Maritz around VMware’s vCloud initiative took place back in the same general hall as the morning keynote. The subject of this special meeting is VMware’s cloud offerings.
VMware’s strategy has three legs: choice, application compatibility, and something else that I didn’t stay long enough to find out.
With regard to choice, VMware now has over 1,000 service providers that provide VMware-ready cloud services. Examples include services from AT&T and others. AT&T takes the stage first to discuss their enterprise-class cloud services. Particularly interesting is AT&T’s Synaptic Storage As a Service offering, which leverages EMC’s Atmos cloud storage offering. Unfortunately, AT&T is short on details about this specific service. After the AT&T presentation is over, VMware takes over again to provide a demonstration of workload federation.
Dino Cicciarelli takes the stage to run the demonstration of the workload federation. The demonstration will show workloads being moved between corporate data centers or from a corporate data center up to an external cloud service provider. The demonstration shows a SQL Server instance under load being migrated between two data centers about 35 miles apart. (There was some questions among attendees as to whether the demonstration was real or simulated; I’d be interested to know the real story behind the demonstration. Anyone want to take me up on that?)
Next on the stage is Savvis. Like AT&T, Savvis spends some time describing their company, their services, etc. Their announcement is their next-generation data center service, called “Project Spirit.” This is a virtual private data center (VPDC) offering with multi-tiered QoS capabilities. The Savvis discussion concludes with a demonstration by Savvis of Project Spirit. It’s pretty clear, though, by the way the demo played and how the Savvis representative was talking on the stage, that the “demo” was really nothing more than a Flash demo or screen movie. (I’m very disappointed.)
Verizon Business is the next player to take the stage and discuss Verizon’s products and solutions. Verizon’s solution is called Computing As a Service (CaaS). (Interesting side note, ePlus has been working with Verizon Business on the design and development of CaaS.) Verizon’s announcement for today is the expansion of their cloud platforms, adding new capacity in Amsterdam and an expanded presence in Europe.
VMware vCloud Express is another part of VMware’s efforts to support choice. Of course, vCloud Express was already discussed (and supposedly demonstrated) in the Day 1 keynote. Oh, look, another partner taking the stage: this time it’s Terremark. One very interesting piece that Terremark showed in their demonstration was PowerShell integration with vCloud Express; now that’s the kind of information they should be showing off here!
Moving away from choice to application compatibility, Paul Maritz again refers to the formal announcement of the vCloud API. The vCloud API is actually a series of APIs that are being/have been submitted to standards organizations (as I mentioned in the keynote coverage, I believe it was submitted to the DMTF). SpringSource takes the stage to talk about what they do and then perform a demo (a live demo?) of their products and technologies. The demo shows off SpringSource and CloudFoundry deploying applications to an external cloud.
I’m sure there are more announcements buried in this event somewhere, but I have to shut down coverage and move on. I’ll update this post later with links to coverage from other bloggers and press members.