IBM Guru Sees Clouds On The Horizon

IBM’s cloud approach versus Cisco-EMC-VMware

IBM and Hewlett-Packard are two of the few companies in the world – in fact, they might be the only two – where a customer can go and find just about everything he or she needs to build a private cloud system: hardware, software, storage, a management platform, and all the services to go with it.

Now they have some competition from a new coalition of individually powerful companies who want in on the coming cloud-building bonanza: Cisco Systems, EMC and VMware – along with chipmaker Intel, which sells to just about everybody anyway.

This group of cloud partners revealed 3 November that they have formed a new joint venture, the Virtual Computing Environment, to produce cloud computing systems called vBlocks that integrate hardware and software from all three companies.

The coalition – along with processor maker Intel – also announced that is starting up a new, shared-equity company called Acadia to handle the specifics of marketing the new vBlock systems.

vBlocks are preintegrated, preconfigured computing systems consisting of networkware from Cisco, storage/security/system management from EMC, and virtualisation software from VMware. The resulting cloud computing systems will range in size from hundreds of virtual machines to more than 6,000 virtual machines, depending upon the need of the customer.

IBM’s response? “The fact that they need to build a partnership is a confirmation that there is a lack of integration and of complexity reduction,” Clementi said. “This kind of confirms that they are trying to match, or to complete, the capability [that IBM owns].

“Here is what I believe is most important: We say cloud computing is going to be applicable to a vast majority of workloads. First, it will be workload dependent. Secondly, we say this all about service management; then we say we need to give our customers choice in deployment,” Clementi said.

Then, in matching this approach back to Cisco-EMC-VMware’s, Clementi compared this to innovation emanating from the consumer market.

“This model comes from the consumer world. We all Google, we Shutterfly, we tweet, we do all kinds of stuff,” Clementi said. “You would feel comfortable with your email out there, but you would feel less comfortable with your banking records out there. So there are requirements for enterprise workloads that will determine which workload goes where.”

Can a coalition of disparate companies put together a cohesive cloud system for customers that works and will be secure from cyberattacks and other problems? Certainly this is possible. Can such a partnership provide the tightest engineering for workload efficiency? That remains to be seen, Clementi said.