Recently Patrick O’Rourke of Microsoft posted insightful commentary on his VMworld Europe 2010 experience, skillfully concluding that the keynote content was almost the same as the San Francisco keynote. No word on whether or not he noticed that most of the breakout sessions were the same. Or the labs…
But that’s not what caught my eye today as I was sifting through some old RSS feeds. The real point that stood out was his keen observation about VMware hybrid clouds:
It reminds me of the early days of fax machines when people needed the exact same fax on both sides of the line in order to make the fax magic work. Same goes for VMware: vSphere on both sides and then customers get hybrid cloud.
It appears that Mr. O’Rourke may have jumped to a faulty conclusion — perhaps not unlike his recent SLES for VMware analysis. If you’ve already standardized on the world’s best virtualization platform for your private cloud, what is the downside to bridging your enterprise to a highly-compatible public cloud?
I seem to have overlooked the Microsoft hybrid cloud solution that interoperates with other platforms — the only private cloud announcements from Microsoft so far have been for the release-date-slipping, repeatedly-renamed mouthful called SCVMMSSP2. But to truly appreciate the hypocrisy of his statement, just take a look at this Hyper-V fax machine demonstration.
Who can shed some light on the Microsoft hybrid cloud panacea?
You weren’t being sarcastic or anything, were you? 🙂
What, me?
Shock….
The downside is of course crippling vendor lock-in. The idea that vSphere will underpin everyone’s cloud environment and keep prices competitive is laughable. Deltacloud is the only open standard for cloud interoperability currently available, allowing you to bridge anything to anything rather than in vmware’s old school fax model.
Given that Deltacloud, and you, are affiliated with Red Hat, it would be very appropriate for you to disclose your relationship in the future.
Anything to anything? Sure.