Cloud Recovery

By Bridget Botelho, News Writer & Barbara Darrow, Senior News Director
01 Sep 2009 | SearchServerVirtualization.com

“SAN FRANCISCO — VMware is pretty well positioned for a cloud computing push given its virtualization strengths, but even ardent VMware shops aren’t quite ready to swallow its cloud sales pitch whole.  

Company CEO Paul Maritz took the VMworld 2009 stage sans tie and jacket on Tuesday to sell a number of upcoming vSphere tools and the company’s cloud agenda to nearly 15,000 attendees.

“A lot of us have to deal with today’s data center, built up with these pillars of complexity that kind of work. How do we get from there, to this promised land [of cloud computing]?” he asked.

His answer, of course, was VMware. Specifically, Maritz claimed that the cloud-oriented vSphere can solve the problems associated with data center complexity.

Customers, many of whom are intrigued by the notion of cloud computing but also a bit put off by what they see as a lack of security and controls, want fewer words and canned demos and more real-life proof points.

Rick J. Scherer, a systems administrator at San Diego Data Processing Corp., a nonprofit IT organization that handles the city’s IT needs, said the cloud vision sounds promising, but he isn’t convinced it can work in real environments, despite VMware’s attempts to show attendees how it works at VMworld.

“Show me a real VMotion of a virtual machine from my data center to [cloud hosting provider] Verizon within the vSphere client, not a fake demo doing a VMotion between two hosts in the same room,” Scherer said.

The chief technology officer of a big Chicago-based financial company that runs thousands of virtual machines (VMs) expressed some confusion around where VMware is going in comparison with its parent company, EMC Corp.

“The Maritz vision is interesting and likely directionally correct, but many steps from reality,” he said via email. “Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, EMC has much the same pitch for what they are doing internally. We have built an internal cloud on vSphere and done some work with Amazon (which uses Xenworks not ESX as the hypervisor) on secure public clouds.”

The CTO, who declined to be identified, maintained that companies like his want the potential benefits of cloud computing — such as adding scale as needed and pay-as-you-go computing — but he reiterated the usual corporate concerns about security and manageability.

“The compelling factor is speed and flexibility rather than cost. Challenges are manageability, reliability and security,” he said. “The cloud business model is a little vaporous (pun intended) right now. Also, data movement didn’t get any easier, so this is better for compute-intensive rather than data-intensive workloads.”

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