Hoping for a More Open VMware

One of the things we associate with existing IT infrastructure vendors is their determination to go it alone for a major portion of their businesses. Vendor each believe that their solution is the best. They feel that integrating with competing solutions is unnecessary. Oracle and Microsoft were the most well-known examples, happily attracting users with a locked-in …

Cloud for All

Building and operating a private cloud is a complex undertaking. Most cloud platforms are designed to play well with thousands of physical servers. This is great for public cloud providers and extremely large enterprise organizations. However, smaller organizations that need a cloud built from tens of physical servers can find these platforms challenging. I’ve written …

How Much Private Cloud Do You Need?

How much private cloud do you really need? A private cloud is all about the IT department getting out of the way of its internal customers, enabling business units and individual developers to provision their own VMs and get on with doing their jobs. But building and operating a private cloud is a complex, and therefore …

Bundling Up for the Cloud

I hear that vendors are bundling cloud services with their other software licensing deals, and I have some thoughts about why. Azure credits are being bundled into Microsoft software license deals. Oracle customers can buy cloud credits as a way of avoiding problems that stem from database software licensing true-ups. There are a couple of ways of …

VSA Resources: Smoking Gun or Red Herring?

In a previous article, I wrote that customers don’t care whether a hyperconverged solution uses a VSA or runs the storage cluster in-kernel. I stand by that assertion. One of the comments pointed out that I had missed an area of discussion: that of the resource requirements of the VSA itself. I still don’t think …