2010: Battle in the Clouds

Advice 2010-02-12 15:59

Craig Nunes of 3PAR says 2010 will be the year in which infrastructure vendors selling a “complete stack” of

As 2010 promises to be the year in which cloud computing and virtualisation become more mainstream, who will win market leadership dollars as customers move from hosting their own applications to running them over the cloud?

With cloud computing and virtualisation becoming more mainstream by the day, 2010 will be the year in which infrastructure vendors selling a “complete stack” of virtualisation hardware, software, and services battle it out with those selling individual, “best-of-breed” products. At stake: who will win market leadership and customer dollars as customers move from hosting their own applications to running them over the cloud.

“Best-of-breed” vendors, as the name implies, stake their claim on doing one thing better than any other vendor while also making their offerings easy to integrate with other best-of-breed hardware or software products. With this approach, the pitch goes, the customer gets the best network switch, blade server, storage array, hypervisor and database available. The customer receives the best performance, reliability, and security at the lowest possible cost without being tied to any one vendor’s proprietary technology.

Examples of best-of breed products in the virtual datacentre include network switches from Cisco, blade servers from HP, server virtualisation from VMware, database software from Oracle, and utility storage from 3PAR. The customers who are most capable of tying all these best-of-breed offerings together are cloud service providers, since integration is their core expertise and in many ways how they distinguish themselves from competitors. Their integration know-how and economies of scale, is also how they argue that they can provide better, or less expensive, services than companies trying to create their own “private clouds.”

Complete stack

On the other side of the ring, the “complete stack” people are betting that at least some customers prefer a fully integrated datacentre stack, even if certain components do not measure up to the best-of-class products. These vendors are offering networks, servers, storage and software pre-configured under one brand, ready to go. Such an approach ought to appeal to SMBs or SMEs who often rely on the reseller channel for integration anyway.

Examples here include EMC’s Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) initiative with Cisco and VMware, HP (with its acquisition of 3COM and EDS), and database giant Oracle (assuming its acquisition of Sun Microsystems goes through, giving it Sun’s server, storage and operating system technology). The largest, savviest cloud computing providers – companies such as Savvis, AT&T Global Hosting, and Terremark – would initially appear to be another prime market for these packaged offerings given the massive infrastructures they must deploy and support. However if these companies all choose the same “stack,” they’ll find it harder to differentiate themselves, or to gain a sustainable cost or performance advantage over their competitors.