TVP Strategy Archives

My Thoughts on the VMware vCloud Hybrid Service

My thoughts on the VMware vCloud Hybrid Service: There was an announcement made last week about the new VMware vCloud Hybrid Service which will bring VMware Public Cloud Service to the masses later this year. There are a couple of posts from our own Virtualization Practice analysts which can be found here and here. Since there has been plenty of conversation about just what the vCloud Hybrid Service is, I am going to use this post to share my thoughts on the service itself.

Virtualization Backup: Tape Still Around

In a recent set of announcements the make virtualization backup and data protection companies have announced support for tape. Tape has always been supported indirectly by virtualization backup companies such as Veeam, Quantum, and PhD Virtual as well as directly by Symantec, HP, CommVault, etc. It is interesting to note that there is a convergence on tape support using two distinct methods. The first is to add support for tape libraries directly into their products: Veeam. The second is to add tape support by better integration with their existing product suite: Quantum. Even so, we know that tape still reigns for storing of large amounts of data. We just cannot seem to be rid of it nor do I think we ever will.

Cloud Scale Apps, Cloud Scale Testing

While at Interop I participated in a Tech Field Day event where Spirent was talking about their new Axon product as well as the possibility of usage of Blitz.io. It was an interesting discussion but gave me some food for thought. As we move to cloud scale apps based on platforms such as Pivotal (EMC World was just down the street), OpenShift, and others, we need a way to test those applications at scale. Spirent and Ixia provide these tools, but would they be used in this new model.

VMware vCloud Hybrid Service

On Tuesday VMware announced their answer to the public cloud: the vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS). One of the biggest hurdles for the roughly 500,000 VMware customers has been that their on-premise, private infrastructure isn’t directly interoperable with any sizable public clouds, like Amazon AWS or RackSpace. If you want to move towards a public or hybrid cloud model you need to add additional software, like Enstratius’ offerings or VMware’s own vCloud Automation Center.

EMC ViPR as a Part of a SDDC

At EMC World 2013, EMC announced ViPR as the answer to storage within the software defined data center. ViPR presents multiple types of storage while segmenting the control plane from the data plane. In addition, ViPR is a head end, fronting traditional storage arrays as an automation and control point and does not replace any array, but, possibly, makes it easier to use those arrays as we move to the software defined data center. Yet, ViPR also raises several questions about how storage will be accessed by the software defined data center, is ViPR the future or is there more to happen?