Who is a Cloud Vendor

What is in a Name

The term Cloud Computing (CC) is one of those universal terms that can be described as “meaning all things to all men”, which for end user organisation’s looking to understand how/if CC fits into their strategies and is as much use the proverbial chocolate teapot. I define CC in a number of different classifications, and this approach can be used to sort out the vendors so that an organisation is more targeted in its definition of CC, or more importantly it can deliver what the organisation expects and wants.

I classify CC in four different ways: Firstly the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) which refers to the vendors that offer the servers and storage needed to execute an organisation’s IT needs, IBM and Amazon are the big names in this class; Secondly, the Platform as a Service (PaaS) vendors such as Google and Microsoft, where the vendors provide the development environment for organisations to design and build solutions and get them to market quickly; Thirdly, Software as a Service (SaaS), which is probably the best known of the CC offerings where the software is hosted and made available to the customer over the Web, Salesforce.com are the best know vendors; Finally, Build Your Own Cloud (BYOC), which provides the capabilities to do all the above internally based on a vendors underlying technology stack, VMware and Citrix are the biggest players in this market. Another option that is distorting the market even more is the move by vendors such as HP and Dell where they are modifying their tradition hosting services to provide CC.

VMWare moves into the Application Layer

SpringSource aquired by VMWare

I see this as a significant, if risky, move by VMWare. This I believe is a move aimed at its pretentions in the Cloud, and if you want to play in that field beyond the nuts and bolts of the Hypervisor then applications and their portability are significant elements. To that end this is as much a response to Oracle’s acquisition of Sun as it is to Microsoft, but it does move them from being just a pure virtualisation player. I do not believe that SpringSource will be re-branded, or that we will see significant changes immediately, but I anticipate that next year the developer platform will be pushed as the platform for the cloud, success will depend on how MS, IBM, and Oracle respond and how many developers switch to using it, or leave it and focus on .NET, BEA, or Websphere (with BMC acquiring MQ series) that can not be ruled out just yet.

Windows Server 2008

Windows Server 2008 is a surprisingly diverse product, with some very small new enhancements that could be easily overlooked, and some large high profile additions that Microsoft is certainly not allowing anybody, including the media, to overlook. However, what is the balanced view on Windows Server 2008.
Firstly, it has an inbuilt Hypervisor – a Hypervisor enables the virtualisation of the commodity server hardware so that it can support the execution of multiple Virtual Machines. Hyper-V, as it is known, is not the most technically advanced Hypervisor on the market, that award goes to Vmware, but it is a very good basic Hypervisor with a couple of interesting features: The ability to execute a Xen based Virtual Machine, and the concept of synthetic device drivers – the synthetic device drivers are the new high performance device drivers that are available with Hyper-V, rather than emulating an existing hardware device Microsoft exposes a new hardware device that has been designed for optimal performance in a virtualised environment.
One of the smaller and easier to overlook features of Windows Server 2008 is the ability to have a finer grained password policy, which may sound dull, but consider the IT department that is supporting ‘C’-level executives who do not necessarily have the time, or inclination, to maintain a complex alphanumeric 10 character password that is forced to be changed every 30 days. This finer control allows for these users to have different rules to say a database administrator, which enables IT to ensure that password policies are designed appropriately for the role/purpose of the account.
The other big feature of Windows Server 2008 is the introduction of server core, a stripped down operating system. This according to Microsoft requires up to 40% less patches to be applied, and occupies significantly less disk space than for the full Windows Server 2008. I consider this to be a major advancement, which will enable organisations to install server core on systems such file and print servers, reducing the maintenance required, and hence the operational cost.
Other features that are worthy of a mention at this stage include; role-based installation of features, simplified clustering using the wizard concept, read-only domain controllers, modified boot process that brings the firewall up earlier and so reduces the window of vulnerability, and the use of Network Access Protection (NAP) so a health policy can be set for anything connected to the network.