VMware aims to build from the ground up the best cloud computing solution for sale as possible.   That is taking into account that cloud computing definition today is as about as vague as a real cloud in the sky.  Today that cloud is fluffy and in 5 mins that cloud is shaped like a rabbit.   As such they have built a pretty strong infrastructure level for customers with vSphere, vCenter and various add-on tools.   They have picked up SpringSource to offer ultimately a platform for services and understanding of how the JVM interacts more closely with the hypervisor.   Now they are getting into the services space with Email/Calendaring.

• IAAS -> vSphere/vCenter
• PAAS -> SpringSource
• SAAS -> Zimbra

Each of these areas is really focused on a different customer base at the end of the day.  Sure you can say IT and that’s like saying your customer base for is for the TV viewing audience.    It is too vague and there is better & a more definable end customer grouping.

• IAAS -> Server/Storage/PC/Hardware Teams – Ground Level System Admins
• PAAS -> Development Teams making solutions up – Architects/Developers
• SAAS -> Back Office management/utilities – Often more visible by the CxOs.

So where are they going next and what areas are missing for the full suite for all the different customer bases they are aiming for?

Much of the legacy technology architectures like Mainframe, client server and n-tier applications are not going away even though everyone claims they are dead.   As such the cloud is just moving these legacy systems into a separately  managed group.   Not necessarily removing them from service. 

One of his big points is that Availability is a bit concerning moving to the cloud.   Application Platform, Vendor Trust, Mgmt/Platform monitoring & Billing are 4 major areas of concern to make sure you know and have defined in the contracts.  Can you trust your business to these when the services are down?  VMware offers some of these.  

The Stratus CTO’s comments are that you need a cloud environment with Fault-tolerant hardware platforms, 24/7 services for support, Culture of high focus on availability technologies, and 30 years of experience doing work like this.   99.999% hardware uptime accomplished by heavy investments into monitoring and operational simplicity.  

Stratus provides and develops lockstep hardware technology to keep things running as they provide hardware tandem architectures.   8 of 10 banks, 10 of 13 pharma, 900 health agencies.   This is clock locked systems in sync.   MasterCard & Visa use this so things always work.    100% of credit card transactions in Japan are run through their servers.  They work on Windows, Linux and now VMware.  

This kind of hardware takes you from Basic HA to Better Fault Tolerance to finally Continous Availability.  The FAA has identified that Continous Availability is extremely critical.   They are looking to upgrade from older versions of the hardware and Stratus’s answer was to move to vSphere with Stratus’s ftServer to get to 24 hour and near 100% uptime.

Virtualization works today for much of the functionality of “cloud”  In the near term their will be Private Clouds.   Moving to public clouds is still in the air and there is a lot of hype versus reality.   Security and availability is a major concern for public clouds.  

What keeps clouds up?   Products, Services, Experience & People and Culture.   It is the whole picture and not just pieces and parts.  What is the cost of downtime and is the possibilty of public downtime acceptable?   Many pieces of technology are extremely difficult to deal with in this regard to validate uptime and keep your business working.

In watching the press conference yesterday the one thing that really hit me is that this is the next game changer. Cloud computing has been stuck for years in lock-in approaches. Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure are development environments that you really need to develop to for your apps to work. The designs and setup have to be extremely customized to function. This is the main reason cloud computing hasn’t taken off full scale. No cross vendor solutions. No ability to take my application out of the box deploy to the cloud system and it just works. No way for me to honestly develop in house and then move it easily to the cloud.

vSphere 4 (or Cloud Infrastructure) is the first Cloud Computing solution that I have seen that doesn’t lock you into a specific vendor. I can run Microsoft Azure on top of vSphere 4 (woah!). It can run on my infrastructure of commodity parts (yeah.. that white box I have can be a cloud computing solution). I can set it up, test it, run it in my basement, then deploy it up to a cloud provider with more bang and power than I have.  I can develop on linux, suse, freebsd, windows, or solaris and have the whole thing packaged up as a deliverable tool. No middleman. This is a powerful concept. This is the game changer.

The reason Microsoft OSes took off in the early ’90s is they were simply the easiest and most accessible development environment out there.  Today Linux/Java/Web is taking most of that development energy by storm.  It costs me nothing to develop solutions on those products.   If I can setup a development environment of my own without having to pay some thousands of dollars just to get started with the tools, I can make the next facebook/twitter/ebay.  I don’t have to be a corporation to develop a solution.

VMware gets that and Paul Maritz was a key component of that understanding at Microsoft. Welcome to the next great thing.