When CloudFoundry was announced, my first thought was this is a nightmare waiting to happen. Why do I think this, because I was not thinking about Open Source developers but enterprise developers and the biggest issue with enterprise development is that the data used by developers is either made up data, but more often than not is actual production data. So the question becomes how can such data be protected when using PaaS public clouds?
Edward L. Haletky, aka Texiwill, is an analyst, author, architect, technologist, and out-of-the-box thinker. As an analyst, Edward looks at all things IoT, big data, cloud, security, and DevOps. As an author, he has written about virtualization and security. As an architect, Edward creates peer-reviewed reference architectures for hybrid cloud, cloud-native applications, and many other aspects of the modern business. As a technologist, Edward creates code prototypes for parts of those architectures. Edward is solving today’s problems in an implementable fashion.
Small Business Virtualization: Part 1 – Licensing
VMware and Microsoft approach the Small to Medium companies quite differently, but which product to buy often depends on your business needs vs cost of the products. However, there needs to be at least one major distinction: SMB vs SME.
The Small to Medium Business (SMB) is quite a bit different than the growing number of Small to Medium Enterprises (SME), and VMware knows this does Microsoft or Citrix?
CloudFoundry Apps not VMs
VMware’s latest effort, CloudFoundry, is not about VMware delving into the PaaS market even deeper. They have done that already with VMforce. CloudFoundry on the other hand is a fairly astute move to enable the development and rapid adoption of cloud based applications. The end goal is to sell what makes up a PaaS environment which is more enabling software. This would enable enterprises and businesses to move to the cloud. The problem with them moving now is that there are not that many applications that are cloud friendly. In effect more concentration on the application and less on the operating system which has always been VMware’s strategic direction.
Harris Trusted Cloud – Closing the Gap
On the 4/7/2011 Virtualization Security Podcast, we were joined by Wyatt Starnes of Harris Corporation. Wyatt is the Vice President of Advanced Concepts of Cyber Integrated Solutions at Harris. What this means, is that Wyatt is one of the key folks of the Harris Trusted Cloud initiative. Trust is a funny word, and we have written about that in the past. Harris’ approach is unique in that they are attempting to ensure integrity of all components of the cloud down to the code level, not just the network with their target being the hosted private cloud and NOT the secure multi-tenant public cloud.
Acquisitions by VMware and RSA Changing the Landscape
There were two announcements over the last few days that struck me as quite important to the virtualization community. While some may question this statement, the long reaching effects of these purchases will impact virtualization and cloud computing in not so distant future. In fact, these purchases could add a whole new layer to vSphere as we know it today. Which for VMware is a good thing. They need to continue to innovate to stay ahead of the pack. The purchases I talk about are:
VMware purchasing/taking over control of EMC Mozy
RSA purchasing NetWitness
ITaaS: Managing Software Costs within Hybrid Clouds
Managing licensing and utilization costs is a mess today in the physical world. Introducing elastic scaling of workloads into a hybrid private/public cloud introduces new uncertainties and new software licensing metering and compliance issues. This is particularly true in the case of enterprise applications which are licensed by the enterprise from the software vendor and then deployed on an as needed basis on Iaas or PaaS clouds.