Hardware Vendor Acquisitions: Posturing for a Cloud War?
Posted by brennels on June 24, 2009
With the acquisitions being made by Dell, IBM, EMC and HP it appears there maybe a posturing to build their own cloud hosting infrastructures. But will it only be available for those who run similar hardware? This could be just the beginning of the cloud war race. I can understand the market strategy but am not 100% convinced that it will pay off in market share. Say for example one of the above mentioned vendors builds a cloud and some already have and you begin providing this service to your preferred customer base. From a cost perspective hosting can be much more cost efficient the attempting to build a disaster recovery data center especially if you are an SMB with few servers or even an enterprise only looking to protect those tier 3 servers with greater than a 24 hour RTO. Most data centers have a variety of hardware platforms and solutions so is it possible these virtual private clouds will only accept the hardware of choice? The challenge is what to do with those servers that aren’t virtualized or reside on other hardware platforms, or don’t have a dedicated SAN which contains most of the critical virtual machine images. It might be hard to position a solution such as this as one size fits all.
This maybe an opportunity for hardware independent 3rd party software solutions to bridge the gap and provide cloud hosting flexibility across all platforms versus hardware specific solutions. Although virtualization has helped ease the pain of vendor hardware lock it seems that some of the new cloud solutions being proposed are using a hardware based or SAN replication. This seems problematic for the typical data center to adopt the ability to backup, recover or run workloads in a specific cloud unless they have compatible hardware to do so or purchasing additional hardware. There may be more to this puzzle than I am seeing but seems that large hardware vendors may be repeating the same mistake as they did when trying to create a dynamic infrastructure based on a hardware solution without the flexibility of cross platform integration that only software can provide.
What are your thoughts on the future of private clouds?
