“Health” can be interpreted in many ways but for the context of our discussion we focused on both availability and the overall price to performance ratio.  It was a great discussion with some well informed panelists.  Give it a watch/listen here:

http://www.newvem.com/free-webinar-recording-dramatically-improve-your-clouds-health/

For more about newvem tune into our Interview Series podcast here:

Stackato is a fork-and-extend (more language support, extended UI, etc.) private PaaS (ie. run anywhere) effort based off of VMware (soon to be spun off) CloudFoundry that supports multiple languages and deep integration potential into your current environment.

HP Cloud also announced workload migration capabilities through a collection of partner offerings including AppZero – an application virtualization solution that encapsulates an application in a “bundle” that then becomes much more portable than traditionally installed software.  Application virtualization is a key strategy for applications that are not “scale aware” to leverage the agility that cloud computing can provide.   Promises of such concepts as cloud-bursting require workload mobility to move between cloud service providers.  The smallest unit of measure in such an example moves from the entire virtual machine (big – sometimes huge) to the application itself (most often much more manageable in size).

It’s no secret that other public cloud providers have stepped on the toes of their own partners by debuting services that are in direct competition with existing third party services – the most recent example being Redshift – Amazon’s data warehousing/analysis offering.  Several vendors with solutions in this space that are tightly integrated with AWS are left to decide where they stand in relation to Redshift and are establishing new differentiation in light of the change.

Even the selection of Akamai as the CDN of choice powering HP Cloud is a partner-vs-build (or at least host) choice that proves interesting and is more evidence that HP is making a concerted effort to focus on building a core platform and fostering growth around it.

There are downsides to the approach, however.  HP may find itself losing some of the control around the details of it’s service offering to it’s partners and their technical direction.  In discussions this week I have learned that HP Cloud will maintain support for Amazon EC2 compatible APIs as long as the OpenStack project does the same – which is definitely not a given going forward.  These are key service consideration that HP are likely best in control of – but because of the reliance of their partners/technology selections they find themselves in a less than desirable position in terms of service leadership.

It would seem that this is the balancing act that service providers must straddle to promote a healthy and trusting group of partners.  The old adage rings true – “If it were easy everyone would do it.”

VMware/EMC could be in the midst of establishing a precedent for traditional infrastructure providers looking to get into the cloud space without compromising the (currently) profitable big-infra sides of their business.  While it seems like a bit of a stretch calling VMware an infrastructure provider – when you consider the software defined [everything] explosion it’s far less of a leap.  You can read about the anticipated announcement here which some expect could come as early as tomorrow.

Sitting in the StoreServ/StoreAll/StoreOnce (herein after referred to as Store*) announcement today at HP Discover Frankfurt, it was very apparent that HP is a technology company divided.  On the one hand HP has been delivering top tier datacenter infrastructure across all of storage/network/compute very successfully for a long time.  Today’s announcement is no exception and is exciting for those looking to solve current problems with third party and legacy enterprise applications.  Marketing terminology aside – the announcement has real legs in terms of being able to simplify the storage equation across production/data archiving/data analytics with real performance gains and a simplified approach from an administrative perspective.  There is a lot to read here including higher performance and data density, security (encryption), and availability of these and other features in a midrange targeted device in the StoreServ 7000 series.  Read all about the announcements here.

If you were writing next generation software aimed squarely at the enterprise today – how would you do so?  For starters – your investors would want you to build it to be delivered “as a service” if at all possible. That aside – you would author it such that scalability and resiliency were built into the application itself in order to support cost effective scale-out based environments.  Redundancy and uptime are being achieved through resiliency in the application layer rather than in the infrastructure layer beneath.  Utilizing APIs of platforms such as Amazon EC2 and/or OpenStack, applications themselves can be in control of redundancy, geographic availability, and even data retention.  The quest for performance is, in many cases, similarly shifting away from the hardware beneath the application to the application itself in a number of ways.  The advent of inexpensive on-demand compute power at a massive scale means operations get distributed horizontally over many instances rather than relying on traditional more vertical compute power.  So where does this leave HP?  Do we consider them a traditional infrastructure company that will slowly go the way of the buffalo as the enterprise gradually adopts the public and/or private cloud models that involve scale out vs. up design and commodity infrastructure?  Not quite.

Enter HP Cloud – HP’s semi-OpenStack powered public cloud offering. HP’s very own marketing materials list the following use cases as squarely in the sights of HP Cloud : backup and archival, disaster recovery, web apps, SaaS, and mobile apps.  Does that sound like some of the use cases we heard of today at the storage announcements?  It sure does.  Internally at HP I have heard the HP Cloud service referred to as “a necessary step to combat the commodity-based public cloud providers such as AWS” – but little more than that.  Nearly a year ago in a two day agenda to discuss cloud and datacenter solutions with HP it got about 10 minutes of coverage.  While I am sure that isn’t reflective of everyone’s views – it does tell a tale of an organization with two distinct perspectives.