It is interesting to follow the advances made by the big IT vendors regarding the cloud technology. Cisco, EMC and VMware have joined forces to form a coalition to generate a virtual computing environment. The three also revealed Acadia, a joint venture to speed up private cloud adoption by delivering Vblock solution which consists of hardware, integrated presales, services and support as well as partner ecosystem. The Vblock itself can be scaled from Vblock 0 to Vblock 2, which in the amount of virtual machines would mean from 300 to 6000 units.

Cloud (IaaS) environments look to be clearly divided in two different segments, one for consumers and startups and one for bigger businesses. Amazon can be seen as the infrastructure for the testers and consumers while the Acadia offering is directed towards businesses wanting to improve the efficiency of the IT utilization by using a private cloud which, I believe, means running VMware vCloud Express or vSphere privately. Xen and KVM has not been talked too much in connection with the enterprise private cloud solutions. The interesting part about vCloud is that it should make it possible to move machines from a private cloud to a 3rd party cloud. There are a number of vendors already, for example Terremark who offer vCloud as the cloud solution. HP is also offering a similar set as Acadia, with its Converged Infrastructure solution.

VMware has not been in the field too long to see a major impact just yet, but it looks like many of the bigger vendors are going towards their solution. It is of course nice to have a solution which can be installed privately (well, yeah there is the latest Ubuntu too which supports Amazon EC2 interface syntactically) and still have some way moving applications to cloud without recoding. I still wonder how or if vCloud handles cloud bursting in some (nice) way.

There is, though, something that worries me with the cool Acadia and CI solutions: they seem pricey, since they represent the pinacle of IT knowledge. I know Google is not using high-end systems with their datacenters and I suppose Amazon isn’t either. How can a significantly smaller cloud provider than Amazon or Google buy top of the line system and start selling capacity to customers with competitive prices? It does not look too lucrative to build the public cloud to be used with vCloud. For companies already locked in VMware it of course isn’t such a big deal upgrading their internal systems from the previous Virtual Infrastructure to vCloud since it follows the natural software life cycle. Opportunities might, though, exist for large enough IT companies such as ISPs to enter this market and this is what Finnish ISP Elisa has done (in Finnish). I wonder who follows them?

Pauli Haikonen