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Cloud Wars Heat Up
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BuzzBy John Considine
Last week I wrote about the Cloud.com acquisition and what it means for Citrix, Rackspace, OpenStack and the industry. Next, I’d like to dig into the VMware announcement about their cloud infrastructure suite. Citrix clearly wanted to announce their news just prior to VMware’s, and for a good reason – Citrix is hitting VMware in a weak spot of their cloud strategy. It’s pretty clear that VMware is not getting the vCloud adoption they were anticipating from service providers and even enterprises.
In Paul Maritz’s presentation, he mentioned that VMware “…has been working closely with service providers because you need the same stacks on both sides [the private cloud and public cloud] to be able to ‘slide’ applications to the cloud…and back again.” At CloudSwitch we are dedicated to the notion that you don’t have to have identical infrastructure stacks between the data center and the cloud. You have to expect that what a cloud provider chooses will not necessarily be the same as what the enterprise has chosen, or that they will work together in lock-step. VMware seems committed to the strategy that they will provide the complete solution on both sides of the cloud, and that all parties will work together to stay coordinated. This is very different from Citrix’s positioning around more open and heterogeneous solutions.
Citrix and VMware have been competing in the virtualization space for years with a battle of features (mostly Citrix catching up with VMware and trying to gain share in the enterprise virtualization market), but the scope of the competition has been growing thanks to cloud computing. Cloud computing expands the server virtualization fight from hypervisor features to integrated stacks for deploying/managing infrastructure. The hypervisors remain important, but the new frontier contains everything from core networking to storage management, to large scale deployments to self-service IT. In this new battle, Citrix has some real strength in networking (Netscaler, etc.) and application delivery, and with their Cloud.com acquisition, they are capturing some proven orchestration technologies.
VMware is investing huge resources to expand their cloud offerings (Maritz claims a million man hours). Their focus is on adding features to their hypervisor and layers to their stack (vSphere+vCenter SRM+vCenter Operations+vShield+vCloud Director). They have lots of expertise in this area and direct interaction with enterprise customers and requirements. On the service provider side, they are dependent on feedback from VMware-based partners to provide input and learn how to build and run large-scale infrastructure clouds. We’ll have to see how this approach plays out vs. Citrix’s CloudStack.
In the end, this competition is great for all of us as well as for CloudSwitch specifically. The competition in the cloud space will continue to drive innovation, new features, and simplification of deployment for this great new platform called cloud computing. CloudSwitch is all about choice and giving enterprises control and flexibility in their cloud architectures. As the world of cloud computing evolves, we love to see different options, technologies, and capabilities – because a world filled with different cloud choices needs a CloudSwitch to connect all of the pieces.
Buying the Cloud
By John Considine
Here we are on July 12, mid-summer when you think most people are wondering about going to the beach in 90 degree weather, and instead we have big cloud news. Early this morning we were greeted with the announcement that Citrix is buying Cloud.com for more than $200M. After the initial congratulations to Sheng and the team at Cloud.com, the twitter-sphere and blogosphere went wild with thoughts and deal analysis. At the same time, everyone was waiting to hear what VMware was going to say in their “Cloud Infrastructure Launch” webcast.
I’ll start with some thoughts on the Cloud.com acquisition. Rather than go into the rationale and size of the deal, I’d like to focus on what this acquisition means to Citrix, OpenStack, and Rackspace.
It’s clear that Citrix has been a major supporter of OpenStack and that support makes sense since it’s a great way to compete against VMware. OpenStack is shaping up to be the answer to the closed source solutions being developed by VMware for building both public and private clouds. It’s also clear that Citrix needed a boost to gain traction and credibility in the market for producing cloud infrastructure. They have a good hypervisor and are busy building out more features, tools, and performance – but cloud infrastructure is a lot more than hypervisor + new features.
Enter the Cloud.com guys. They know how to build clouds, and already have traction with service providers and enterprises alike. They have proved that they know how to make a cloud scale – and this is not as easy as it sounds. Keep in mind that building clouds is more complicated than standing up virtualized clusters and running standard tools; there are complex networking, storage, and workload placement problems, not to mention versioning, maintenance, and operations.
So this is clearly a good thing for Citrix, and on the face of it, a good thing for Cloud.com – but what about OpenStack? The bigger question here is: what does this really mean for the OpenStack community? Is this a case of Citrix providing the enterprise/supported version of OpenStack as RedHat does for Linux? Will we see a set of capabilities delivered by Citrix that are built on OpenStack, but that are exclusive to Citrix’s CloudStack? Will OpenStack be increasingly driven by Citrix’s needs and integration with Xen (versus other hypervisors)?
If Citrix remains committed to its stated direction of providing the software for clouds (rather than building a cloud themselves), they are in a great position to capitalize on OpenStack. Rackspace, on the other hand, has a more complicated opportunity with OpenStack. They created the idea and built the community, but they are limited by the fact that they are themselves a cloud provider, so it would be hard for them to sell and support OpenStack software to other cloud providers and vendors. That leaves the door open for someone else to step in and become the enterprise software vendor for OpenStack. Clearly Citrix has been targeting this, and the addition of Cloud.com adds the full software stack and knowhow for building and deploying a cloud.
And in other news...VMware announced its Cloud Infrastructure suite today. Given that the VMware announcement was previously scheduled, I can only conclude that Citrix picked today to overlap with their announcement. These two announcements occurring on this sleepy mid-July date point to high activity in the cloud space, and the coming wars around who is going to provide the cloud infrastructure for both service providers and the enterprise. This may become a battle of closed source solutions from VMware and open source solutions from Citrix (and OpenStack)… I’ll write more about the VMware announcement in my next blog, but the battle between Citrix and VMware is definitely heating up.
