At the OpenStack Summit last week, Tuesday’s keynote opened with Dope’n’Stack E.N.T.E.R.P.R.I.S.E, a video that symbolizes the arrival of a new force of disruptors who see riches in building software and systems that will displace the legacy systems of old. It’s not a question anymore. OpenStack has the momentum to win, and it can thank this young group of developers and feisty systems gurus for making it happen.

Companies that have long controlled the enterprise software and systems market are now at a distinct disadvantage. Their proprietary, closed-stack integrations don’t play in the new open cloud world that emulates the success of Internet-scale companies, such as Amazon Web Services, Google and Facebook. And this group of technologists knows it, making it abundantly clear last week in Portland.

Cloudscaling CTO Randy Bias summed up OpenStack’s place in the market in a presentation this week, titled “The State of the Stack.” The presentation reviews the findings of a survey done with OpenStack users and relevant data about the overall community.

OpenStack is as much a stack as is Linux or Java. That points to a future where it has a chance to become a standard for building out cloud infrastructure. It has the attention of startups and large enterprise companies. Successes have come with customers such as Bloomberg, Comcast, Best Buy, CERN Laboratories and the NSA, all which have built core technology on OpenStack. It has served as a stack to try new technologies, such as the Ceph storage system and any number of new networking technologies.

What hypervisor OpenStack users deploy is one of the most telling signs of the shift and the adaptive role that older, more established companies have had to take on. According to an OpenStack survey, KVM has become the hypervisor of choice due to its open-management platform. It has no licensing fees and allows for free choice in how it is used. KVM is backed by Red Hat. Xen, it should be noted, became part of the Linux Foundation last week with the support of Amazon Web Services, which will have definite impacts on the market. Until this point, Citrix maintained a community edition of Xen, similar to the way Red Hat treats KVM. Other supporters include hardware and silicon vendors such as AMD, Calxeda, Cisco, Intel and Samsung. Companies that use Xen in software products such as Bromium and Citrix. And large scale users of Xen, such as Amazon, CA, Google and Verizon Terremark. AWS uses the Xen hypervisor.

This puts particular pressure on VMware, which now faces both KVM and Xen. In an email, Bias said VMware must open its core ESX hypervisor in order to remain relevant in today’s market:

Bottom line on VMware is that if they don’t open up their management of ESX to non-VMware players and OpenStack generally, they won’t be able to transition to true elastic cloud, will be stuck with only their existing workloads. They will become another Novell.

A VMware spokesperson would not comment when asked if the company would open ESX. Still, VMware can by no means be counted out, said Rishidot Research Founder Krishnan Subramanian.

VMware’s position is a bit rocky. In fact, every big enterprise who is using OpenStack on production environments said they moved from VMware and they went with OpenStack because they feel that whatever VMware offers on the cloud is not good enough for them. I still wouldn’t write off VMware. They understand that they are in a precarious position. They are preparing for such a future by going up the stack and getting ready for more heterogenous environments underneath. DynamicOps acquisition will play a role there.

That focus on heterogeneous stacks is exactly what VMware espouses. And they are supporting the customers who are moving to OpenStack environments. VMware is also one of the top 10 contributors to OpenStack.

Martin Cassado was a co-founder at Nicira, which sold to VMware last year for $1.26 billion. He wrote a blog post last week summing up VMware’s participation in OpenStack:

The rationale for VMware’s involvement in OpenStack is simple. The transformation to the software-defined data center will take many forms, and VMware understands that many customers will want to piece together different technologies based on their requirements using open frameworks. Nicira was quite successful with this model, and VMware is committed to supporting that trajectory not just with networking, but with compute and management as well.

Such A Thing As Too Brash?

I wonder, though, if the OpenStack community is sometimes too brash. They are no doubt brilliant technologists, but there is a point in the Dope’n’Stack video where the duo crosses the line from fun entertainment to questionably offensive.

OpenStack organizers showed an edited version of the video to the attendees gathered for the keynote. Organizers said they wanted to provide the audience a “G” rated version.

The reference to “doing more pilots than promiscuous flight attendants” caught the notice of at least one person at the conference.

@dopenstack – pilots line was too much – do better next time. You forgot there are women in IT? Adria Richards didn’t teach you anything?

— Ian Colle (@ircolle) April 16, 2013

The Dope’n’Stack team said they were not gender-specific in their remarks. It still did not go over well.

@dopenstack Heh, OK, I’ll revise my comment. Making a word play about “doing” anyone or anything is always and in every case in poor taste.

— Ian Colle (@ircolle) April 16, 2013

Dope’n’Stack E.N.T.E.R.P.R.I.S.E is a view into the OpenStack community. It’s fun, energetic and shows the ambition of this young organization. In just three years the community-driven effort has become one of the most powerful movements in IT. It stands to serve as the foundation for how organizations build out elastic stacks.

But there are still questions about maturity both in terms of its attitude and how it evolves as an organization. Says Subramanian: The future of cloud infrastructure platform market is OpenStack’s to lose. If they do it right, they could become the dominant platform but it is a very big “if.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Big Switch, one of the hottest startups in the fast-growing software defined networking (SDN) market, has named Jason Matlof as its new vice president of marketing after he left Battery Ventures as a partner in September.

The move is noteworthy, because it illustrates how fast the new networking space is emerging, as data becomes ever more difficult to manage on traditional physical infrastructure. SDN technology helps to facilitate the virtualization of the network. The dream is that the network can be anywhere. In more practical terms it means that customers can program their networks to their needs. Big Switch makes the claim that it can decrease networking complexity and thus save money on capital and operational expenses.

Big Switch is getting a lot of attention now that Nicira, its biggest competitor, sold to VMware for $1.26 billion. The move to hire Matlof, who has a deep background in networking, shows that the company is beefing up its management team with the potential of getting gobbled up by a VMware competitor.

A competitor may likely be one of the major companies pushing converged infrastructure. That’s not likely going to be Oracle but more so a company like IBM, which Brad Casemore points out on his excellent blog, “Twilight of the Nerds”:

One company I had envisioned as a potential (though less likely) acquirer of Nicira was IBM, which already has a vSwitch. IBM might now settle for the SDN-controller technology available from Big Switch Networks. The two have been working together on IBM’s Open Data Center Interoperable Network (ODIN), and Big Switch’s technology fits well with IBM’s PureSystems and its top-down model of having application workloads command and control  virtualized infrastructure. As the second network-virtualization domino to fall, Big Switch likely will go for a lower price than did Nicira.

It’s the price tag that becomes the issue here. VMware paid a lot of money for Nicrira, inflating values for companies across the space. Casemore believes Big Switch would go for less than Nicira.

We’ll see what happens, but with Matlof on the team I’d expect there is a higher likelihood that Big Switch is looking at what its exit might be.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Paul Maritz turned over the job of VMware CEO to EMC’s COO Pat Gelsinger on stage at VMworld today. It’s a move long expected that tells us more about the company’s future direction as it moves into new territory beyond its enterprise kingdom.

There are battles ahead with the likes of Cisco, trust to gain and lose with the open source community. Gelsinger will now have to lead the evolution of VMware’s Cloud Foundry and recent acquisitions such as DynamicOps and Nicira, the $1.26 billion acquisition that closed last week.

He faces a world that is innovating all around VMware. The company can sell just so many virtual machines. It now has to innovate.

Maritz remarked about that need for his introduction, before turning his job over to Gelsinger.

Maritz, one of the great technologists of our time, stood on stage and said we are coming to the end of 50 year journey to automate the paper based processes. Today, business is dependent on providing an experience to customers. Maritz said there will need to be innovation in taking multiple data streams to create new experiences. We will see an equal pace in the change of IT over the next four years as we did in the past four years.

The greatest change will be in our data centers, applications and new forms of data fabrics. Results will get presented to people in a post-PC multiple device world. He said the conference will focus on these different layers.

What will become of Maritz? He will remain on the VMware board of directors. But his full-time job will be in reporting to EMC CEO Joe Tucci.

What he will do is still unclear. EMC faces its own battles with up and coming flash storage providers such as Fusion-io, now a publicly traded company and startups such as Nutanix, which just raised $25 million for its converged systems.

He will need to put more attention Cisco, which EMC and VMware will compete with more now that it is in the business of software defined networking.

There is the future of Cloud Foundry to contend with and the trust it needs to build with the open source community. VMware did announce its support for OpenStack as a gold member yesterday. It’s symbolic more than anything else but it does show that EMC/VMware sees more interest in differentiating as a platform provider. As Rishidot analtyst Krishnan Subramanian explains — this means VMware can sell support for the great majority of companies that have VMware technology installed in their data centers.

This is in large part why we hear so much talk about the “software defined data center,” from VMware. Nicira will provide ways for the companies to create more capabilities to manage multiple clouds. But with that networking capability it will mean deeper competition for a host of new startups.

And that has to be both Martiz and Gelsinger’s challenge – how to keep the pace of innovation while still maintaining its vast legacy business.

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Lew Tucker is the distinguished Cloud CTO for Cisco Systems. He’s a revered character in the “clouderati,” community for his clear views and his support for OpenStack, the open cloud effort that is getting a lot of attention these past few weeks.

He’s also a proponent of open source. In this video posted July 23, he says open source is an increasing part of Cisco’s future. It’s a way to give back to the community and make the world a better place. He describes how Cisco is responding to the market need for an alternative to Amazon Web Services. He says Cisco sees that as an opportunity to develop a network based service that is an integral part of OpenStack.

It’s a timely video. Cisco has been an active contributor to OpenStack, especially with its involvement in the Quantum Project, an effort to build next generation virtual networks more suited to the cloud than traditional physical networks.

It’s even more timely considering we now have VMware entering the OpenStack community through its acquisition of Nicira this week for $1.26 billion. Nicira is a software defined networking (SDN) technology company that is also active in OpenStack. Now that it is owned by VMware, its role in OpenStack is uncertain. Further, it raises questions about Cisco’s relationship with VMware. The two have been long time partners. The proof of how that relationship unfolds may very well come down to how VMware participates in the open cloud movement.

Nicira and other companies in the SDN space have helped usher in a change in the way we view networking technology. It’s now the network that is virtualized. The network can exist anywhere. Everything becomes a node. That changes everything. Now a network can be programmed on the fly. It completes the cloud triangle. Compute is virtualized. Storage is getting there. Networking is next.

But will VMware embrace OpenStack and tout an open, cloudy future? It already has Cloud Foundry, its open source platform as a service (PaaS). But in the great scope of things, Cloud Foundry plays a small role in VMware’s business. The company’s real muscle is in its virtualization technology where it owns the market. Will the company open it to OpenStack?

Earlier this week, I had a conversation with Joshua McKenty of Piston Cloud who helped me connect the dots about VMware and what it may ultimately do. McKenty is one of the original founders of OpenStack.

Paul Maritz departure from VMware earlier this month signaled what was to come. Stories circulated that OpenStack was spinning out and Maritz was being considered for the job. For now, he has landed at EMC as the company’s chief strategist, reporting to CEO Joe Tucci. But it doesn’t make sense for him just to lead Cloud Foundry. It’s a tiny group. Important, but tiny. The real connection comes when you consider that EMC, VMware’s parent company, is considering integrating Cloud Foundry with Greenplum, its big data analytics group. Then there is DynamicOps, the company VMware acquired earlier this month. Its technology is designed to orchestrate IT infrastructure. Nicira would complete the play, giving VMware the network virtualization backbone that until now it has not had.

Would Maritz lead this group? That would make sense. He’d be leading EMC’s most important initiative. An effort that would be nothing less than turning the company’s virtualization empire into one that is about delivering services on a cloud stack.

But there’s a catch. Cisco and Nicira had been collaborating through OpenStack on the Quantum Project. VMware is entering a den where it may not be accepted. Especially if VCE falls apart. That’s the company EMC, VMware and Cisco started to market big box, converged systems. In other words, new age mainframes.

But until the Nicira acquisition came into play, VMware’s cloud strategy was not entirely clear. And that brings us back to the question about VMware’s openness.

VMware seems to be admitting that the underlying infrastructure will be “federated,” as my friend and analyst Krishnan Subramanian argues. It’s hard to see it any other way. Infrastructures are fractured. Portability is pretty much nonexistent. Federating infrastructures would give VMware a way to build a network services environment with Nicira. Cloud Foundry would serve as the universal PaaS and Greenplum acting as an analytics engine. DynamicOps would serve as the orchestration layer.

In order for this scenario to play out, VMware would have to take a position that for it would be extreme. It would mean VMware making it easy to move its proprietary virtualization technology to OpenStack.

Cisco has made the move to OpenStack and through that has shown a commitment to open source efforts. It is working with other networking companies to develop a software defined network where the network goes to the application in an open environment.

Will VMware make its own jump into OpenStack? if it did then it would be a noteworthy shift for VMware and show a significant commitment to the open cloud. It would well suit OpenStack. It would mean that we see a new generation of clouds that are open yet suited to the needs of any individual organization. And it may determine what kind of relationship it has with Cisco.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

VMware has acquired Nicira, a startup known for its software defined networking technology in a deal pegged at $1.26 billion. It’s an acquisition that has all sorts of ramifications for the ever disruptive enterprise sector of the market.

Nicira emerged out of stealth in February after five years in development. It has been widely considered as a successor to traditional networking technology in its capability to create a software defined environment that can essentially be programmed to change through adjustments in the software. This allows for elasticity and the ability to move data easily. It integrates well with horizontal storage environments by scaling out data over horizontal envioronments. Nicira’s software in effect turns a network into an IP backplane. Hierarchies in  physical networks creates bottlenecks. Nicira creates a flat network. Devices connect directly to the switch, allowing for the data to distribute effectively across its infrastructure.

Nicira had $50 million in funding and a blue chip list of clients that include Rackspace, EBay and Fidelity. Its venture backers include Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Ventures, which has won big by investing in transformative data center technologies. VMware Co-Founder Diane Greene is also an investor.

In an interview with me today, Ben Horowitz said that VMware has bought an option on the future of the networking market. He said he asked himself some times during Nicira board meetings about selling the company, considering the fact that it is so young. He said they made the decision considering that being part of VMware gives them a great chance to being the biggest networking technology in the world. He said the market is expected to be $37 billion to $40 billion in size over next few years.

Cloud computing has disrupted VMware as much as any legacy technology company. Nicira helps alleviate the pressure VMware faces in forming a comprehensive strategy to compete with Amazon Web Services and OpenStack, which is fast emerging as a viable alternative for building out cloud environments. It also puts VMware face to face with competiors such as Cisco, which it has deep relationships with.

But there is a certain irony here. Nicira is a significant part of OpenStack. The network interface for OpenStack uses the Nicira API. It means that VMware is now by proxy part of the OpenStack community as part of a longer term play for the networking market.

OpenStack is a federated way to pool various workloads from different cloud environments. Krishnan Subramanian of Rishidot Research said Cloudstack, Eucalyptus and OpenStack will serve as the foundation for federated ecosystems. Nicira fits right into that play with its software defined networking.

In the future, clouds will be defined by big data and services environments, Subramanian said. VMware recognizes that shift as a long term strategy.

“You will need to program the network to fit your needs,” he said.

VMware CTO Steve Herrod said the company believes the future is in software defined networking.  There will also be a need for orchestration. That’s where its acquisition of DynamicOps comes into play.  Cloud Foundry, its homegrown platform as a service, will play into that future as well. It provides what Herrod calls the “application language of the heterogeneous environment.”

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The enterprise is moving towards simplicity, and this extends to the data center. Nicira, a stealthy virtualization startup with backing from big-name investors, is pulling the curtains back on its disruptive platform that hopes to change the way server and storage virtualization is done. And Nicira is revealing that it has raised with $50 million in funding to date from Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners and New Enterprise Associates, as well as individual investors including VMware co-founder Diane Greene and Benchmark Capital cofounder Andy Rachleff.

Nicira’s NVP is a software-based system that creates a distributed virtual network infrastructure in cloud data centers that is completely decoupled and independent from physical network hardware. Nicira says that it is shifting the intelligence and control of the network away from hardware and into software, simplifying the virtualization process.

NVP’s platform forms a thin software layer that treats the physical network as an IP backplane. This approach allows the creation of virtual networks that have the same properties and services as physical networks, such as security and QoS policies, L2 reachability, and higher-level service capabilities.

According to the company, organizations can provision and deploy services in minutes rather than weeks or months, and you don’t need to change any of your existing hardware or software infrastructure. All enterprises need is IP connectivity.

Nicira says that virtualized data centers face limits to what applications they can support and where the workloads can be placed. These limitations result in restricted workload mobility, and leave data centers under utilized.

Stephen Mullaney, Chief Executive Officer of Nicira, explained to us that the network hasn’t evolved for the cloud-based data center, and the existing solutions are inflexible and complex. “The solution is to virtualize and create virtual networks that are decoupled from physical networks. The network is transitioning from hardware to software just like every other business. Software is eating the world,” he says.

The NVP platform is compatible with any data center network hardware. It can be deployed on any existing network, and it allows for future changes to the network hardware without disruption to the operations of the virtual network platform. The software is delivered through a usage-based, monthly subscription-pricing model, which scales per virtual network port. Customers only pay for what they use, and pricing scales accordingly. The company, which has nabbed a number of executives from Cisco, already counts AT&T, eBay, Fidelity Investments, NTT and Rackspace as customers.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch