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When CEO Pat Gelsinger walked onto the stage at VMworld  Europe in Barcelona back in October, he was on his 39th day in the job. The new man at the helm of VMware had only recently moved from being President and COO of Information Infrastructure Productsat EMC, VMware’s parent firm.
 

Although he was a long-time veteran of Intel, the fact that Gelsinger was moving back to the West Coast of the US (VMware is based in Palo Alto, California, while EMC is based in Massachusetts on the East Coast) is probably the least of his concerns.

On stage at VMworld Europe, Gelsinger reminds us that from the vantage of EMC’s headquarters one can look at monuments to the past glories of mini computer companies such as Data General (bought by EMC) and Digital Equipment Corporation, swallowed by HP via Compaq.

He says: “In 1989 I wrote a paper on the death of the mainframe. From EMC’s location we look over the buildings that once housed the mini computer companies that have long since died.”

This is a lead into the Cloud changing everything and the promise that IT is finally able to deliver a proactive business solution.

No longer stuck as a reactive service, cloud is changing every aspect of the data center – from service catalogues to new apps, to big data, creating a top-to-bottom disruption of infrastructure to application.

Today, 65% of servers are virtualized – the target it 90%, says Gelsinger, lest we forget there are products to be bought. Big data means being able to accelerate knowledge led business decisions from weeks to days to minutes to real time. He says he is happy to be looking at the hardware world from a software perspective, especially as he spent all of his Intel years looking ‘up’ at the software players.


Today’s data center is the museum of IT from the past because the networks and firewalls are bottlenecks, Gelsinger says, getting into his stride. The stacks won’t provide the flexibility required for future functions and applications.


Instead of creating more proprietary stacks such as Hadoop, the data center offered by VMware can offer a path – or several paths – through the labyrinth.


“We abstract, we pool, we automate – and we need to do that for all parts of the data center. This is the premise of the software-defined data center – one common platform for all data center services.”

IT then becomes a broker of services in a hybrid, multi-platform, multi-provider and multi-cloud world, he explains.


This is all very comprehensive and coherent, but looking beneath the vision there are some hard business decisions and some hard positions being taken. Let’s stick with the Cloud for the moment.

VMware has positioned itself as the Cloud infrastructure provider. As VMware had its VMworld Conference in August in San Francisco, there wasn’t a great deal it could announce at VMworld Europe. But so as not to let down its European fans, it added some product enhancements.


Competitive Landscape 

While its comprehensive portfolio would seem to have all of the Cloud bases covered, VMware is keen to point out that it recognizes the reality of heterogeneous environments. “We recognize that the complexity of their IT reality dictates a need for flexibility and choice when it comes to IT solutions.”

Where it does choose to differentiate is in separation from the management vendors BMC, IBM, CA and HP. Its position is that they are primarily solutions providers for physical infrastructure – a space on which it has no designs. VMware, alternately, is focused on delivering management to optimize virtual/cloud environments. It would appear the company wishes to integrate with traditional management systems just long enough to get users on to a virtualized cloud.


The firm reserves its toughest position for Microsoft. VMware’s position is that Microsoft compares its future products with VMware products that are already installed with customers. It goes so far as to say that Microsoft’s attempts to get enterprises to rebuild a virtualization infrastructure with Windows Server Hyper-V is a big step backwards.


As for OpenStack, VMware does not consider OpenStack to be a significant threat to its portfolio, as OpenStack is an open source effort to support several hypervisors. It says its vCloud suite can support both vCloud and OpenStack.


Products and Services

Automation means that configuration of VMs running on Amazon Web Services and your own private cloud hardware is possible. It also allows for the detection of sensitive information and applying continuous compliance policies that will allow users to detect information that should be moved into quarantine. An inventory of VM instances can discover the applications on the machines and facilitate the building of a dependency map. Configuration, compliance and capacity provides application awareness down to the infrastructure level and ultimately allows the separation of the hardware from the applications. VMware is more confident talking about the numbers of applications and the number of servers that are virtualized than talking about the number of genuine private clouds that are in operation. This is partly a product of definition – how many boxes have to be ticked to qualify as a private cloud as opposed to a virtualization project is unclear.
 

Certain things, however, don’t change. The buzzwords in virtualization and cloud have a correlation: management, SLAs, people, processing, analytics, performance and integration. Where VMware is unconcerned is in the development of standards.


In response to a question from FOCUS on whether a lack of standards is restricting cloud adoption, Gelsinger said: “I disagree with the way the question is phrased. A lack of cloud standards is not restricting the adoption of private or public cloud – governance, security and SLAs are concerns, but not standards. Standards will emerge from services, and we will work with standards bodies as they emerge.”


Software defined

VMware accepts that there is a long way to go until we arrive at the software-defined data center, but it says the vCloud suite is an important step on the journey. And knowing full well that after the technological challenges have been met, the next challenge is around management of clouds – vClouds, physical, non-VMware and public cloud – what you really need to know is which applications are running where. You will need to store the applications as blueprints, and you will want to know where they are. In a heterogeneous world, you need to know you can manage all of these platforms.

VMware says that in this world of different infrastructures, its IT Business Management 7.5 will provide a dashboard that enables the CIO to view application service delivery on a cost versus budget basis.

It does not provide an airbag for any crashes outside its control.
 

This article first appeared in FOCUS Magazine Issue 26. Read the Digital Edition