The Pros and Cons of Private and Public PaaS

I just returned from attending the Cloud Expo in New York City this week. The conference was dominated by private and hybrid cloud topics. There were several private Platform as a Service (PaaS) vendors attending whom I spent a great deal of time talking to as I walked the floor. It seems these days that many enterprises default to private and hybrid clouds and therefore insist on private PaaS as well. It is critical that consumers of PaaS services understand the pros and cons of both public and private PaaS before making a commitment to a PaaS deployment model.

Public Cloud Use Cases

There are different public cloud use cases. Here at The Virtualization Practice we moved our datacenter from the north to the south part of the country and utilized the cloud to host the workloads during the transition. Edward Haletky, yesterday posted about Evaluating the Cloud: Keeping your Cloud Presence and presented the question and his thoughts of is it worth staying in the cloud or bringing the data home.

What is the Future of Virtual Storage in a Software Defined Data Center?

What is the future of virtual storage in a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC)? As more and more technology gets moved from hardware to software in the SDDC, I have to wonder which direction virtual storage will go.

If we use networking as an example, the technology has evolved from setting up local virtual switches on each of the hosts to a virtual distributed switch (VDS) model where all the individual host-level virtual switches are abstracted into a single large VDS that spans multiple hosts at the Datacenter level. In this design, the data plane remains local to each VDS, but the management plane is centralized with VMware vCenter Server acting as the control point for all configured VDS instances.

Host Deployments in a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC)

Host deployments in a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC): How do you deploy the hypervisors in your company? There are several different choices from installing from a CD, network install and/or PXE, to name a few methods currently available. When there are not a lot of physical hypervisors to worry about the CD installation works just fine and the need for automated installation gets stronger in direct correlation to the number of hosts.

OpenStack and the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC)

The future of OpenStack looks bright, and with the all the software-defined data center (SDDC) features contained in the recent release of “Grizzly” they are now ready to compete toe-to-toe with heavyweights like VMware, Nutanix, Dell, and HP. Whether they can start unseating VMware products in the enterprise remains to be seen, though. Despite the immediate SDDC advantage of OpenStack, companies and technologies like that of Nicira and Virsto, both acquired by VMware, are not to be ignored.