(the lack of) PaaS/SaaS private clouds and the VMware’s vision

Posted by virtualization.info Staff   |   Tuesday, April 13th, 2010   |  

vmware logo

Why all private clouds being promoted these days are just Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds?

Why we have several vendors that offer hardware virtualization platforms for on-premises IaaS clouds and nobody that offers something similar for private PaaS and SaaS clouds?

On average, the commonly shared long-term vision for cloud computing is about a world where off-premises facilities host 100% of business applications and where nobody, except cloud providers, has to care about the underlying complexity of operating systems, physical servers, storage arrays, networking, security, and everything else comes to mind when we thing about our existing data centers.
Actualizing such vision requires addressing a number of technical issues (related to security and compliance, orchestration, billing, etc.) and changing the mindset of individuals inside corporations (the concepts of “physical ownership” and “trust what you see” are two of the strongest in human mind).

Because of these challenges the on-demand world above is still, say, ten years away and the industry is approaching it with little steps.
The first one definitively is IaaS private clouds, but looking forward this is just a transitional phase, pretty much like hardware virtualization is a transitional phase to application virtualization.
Before moving all their business outside the company’s walls, customers will likely first embrace IaaS private clouds, then PaaS and SaaS private clouds and ultimately SaaS public clouds.

So why vendors like Google, Zoho, Salesforce or even Facebook aren’t interested in delivering an on-premises version of Google and Zoho Office, Salesforce CRM, or “Corporate Facebook” today?
Why Microsoft just plans to sell subscriptions for a hosted version of Office 2010 rather than offering the web version to the companies that want to host it internally?
Someone may argue that this is not the business model of these companies, and in some cases that’s an entirely valid objection, but is it possible that none of their competitors wants to bet on the idea of private SaaS?

A possible explanation for the lack of PaaS/SaaS private cloud offerings is that the existing products rely on ad-hoc infrastructures that are fairly expensive, complex to replicate and definitively not market-ready.
The underlying grids that power them may be made of custom-designed physical servers plus recompiled Linux kernels plus proprietary agents (like Google does), or built by nesting together multiple virtualization technologies, glued together by daily updated fabric controllers that should be considered more a work-in-progress rather than a production-ready piece of software.

This is where VMware may want to be.

If the vendor can provide an out-of-the-box infrastructure for IaaS/PaaS/SaaS cloud computing, SaaS vendors adopting it can lower the cost of designing their data centers, and most of all they can offer on-premises versions of their products more easily.
Such out-of-the-box infrastructure should have abstraction layers that can be turned on and off on demand to address the needs of different customers: cloud-aware hardware virtualization (vSphere) for those that just want IaaS clouds, cloud-aware application frameworks (Spring) on top of it for those that want PaaS clouds, and white-labeled, cloud-aware web applications (Zimbra, Redis, and others to come) on top of it, for those that want to offer SaaS clouds.

If Facebook internally moves on such VMware infrastructure, and, say, a Fortune 500 moves on the same infrastructure, how much easier is to sell and deploy “Corporate Facebook”?
And if the customer doesn’t have the infrastructure yet, how convenient is for both VMware and Facebook to sell a bundle?



blog comments powered by Disqus


virtualization.info Newest articles
Paper: VMware vSphere Metro Storage Cluster Case Study

May 23rd, 2012

Yesterday VMware published a paper focused on VMware vMSC (vSphere Metro Storage Cluster), a new configuration within the VMware Hardware Compatibility List intended for environments where disaster/downtime avoidance is a…

EMC acquires Syncplicity

May 22nd, 2012

Yesterday, during its annual conference in Las Vegas, EMC announced the acquisition of Syncplicity, a cloud-storage privately held startup founded in 2008 and based in Menlo Park, California.
Terms…

Release: Oracle VM Server for x86 3.1

May 21st, 2012

On May 18th Oracle announced the general availability of version 3.1 of its x86 enterprise virtualization solution VM Server.
This release follows 3.0 announced on August 24th 2011.
All the new…

VMware shows View 5.1 performance improvements

May 21st, 2012

In this post, published on May 18 in VROOM! Blog, the VMware’s Performance Team presented some of the most significant enhancements and optimizations brought to Teradici‘s PCoIP protocol in the…

NVIDIA introduces World’s Firs Virtualized GPU

May 17th, 2012

On May 15th NVIDIA unveiled the NVIDIA® VGX™ platform that will be available later this year through NVIDIA’s hardware OEM and VDI partners.
This new platform promises to deliver…

Microsoft announces Assessment and Planning Toolkit 7.0 Beta Program

May 17th, 2012

Microsoft announced this week the new Beta version of its capacity planning tool Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) 7.0 Beta.
The Beta program opened on May 15th and the review…

VMware announces vFabric Suite 5.1

May 15th, 2012

Today VMware announced VMware vFabric Suite 5.1, expected to be generally available in Q2 2012.
vFabric Suite 5.1 includes vFabric Application Director, to automate the deployment and management of vFabric…

VMware CTO talks about R&D plans for the future

May 15th, 2012

On April 4 Stephen Herrod, VMware’s CTO, has attended, as guest speaker, at a VMUG meeting in Italy.
One of the key point of the speech, documented in one hour-long…

Citrix Hosted Server VDI Tech Preview

May 14th, 2012

Last week Citrix announced a new tech preview for Hosted Server VDI technology that allows cloud providers to leverage Microsoft SPLA to host VDI-style desktops obtaining a pay-as-you-go monthly subscription licensing…

Release: Atlantis ILIO Diskless VDI 3.2

May 11th, 2012

On May 7 Atlantis Computing announced the general availability of its Atlantis ILIO Diskless VDI 3.2, this product, tailored in particular for VMware View 5.1, enables virtual desktops deployment…

Citrix unveils Project Aruba

May 11th, 2012

On May 7 Citrix announced a technology preview of Project Aruba that extends Citrix VDI all-in-one proposal for the SMB market, VDI-in-a-Box, with personal vDisk technology.
VDI-in-a-Box, inherited from Kaviza…

Cloud Sidekick announced Early Access release of Cato EE

May 10th, 2012

On May 7 Cloud Sidekick announced the Early Access Program release of Cato Enterprise Edition (EE) which extends the Community Edition (CE) with Storm Deployment Automation and support for…

Release: VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator (VIN) 1.1

May 9th, 2012

On April 26 VMware announced the general availability of VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator (VIN) 1.1, previously introduced as a part of vCenter Operations Management Suite.
VIN automatically detects, discovers and…

VMware accelerates security updates after ESX source code leak

May 8th, 2012

On May 3 VMware released a security update, that the company itself define as “accelerated“, with the purpose to patch five “critical” security issues across VMware ESX and ESXi hypervisor…

 
Monthly Archive