While Verizon is acquiring Terremark and Time Warner Cable, yes TW Cable, is acquiring NaviSite, Amazon continues to disrupt the industry with their 12 plus Cloud offerings. The more EC2 grows, generated $220 million in 2009 with predicted revenue of $500 Million in 2010 and $750 Million in 2011, the more it validates that customers are willing to transform their purchasing behavior from hardware devices to compute nodes.
Meanwhile, Enterprises are struggling with virtualization and virtualization stall with the impending reality that they must operate within a Cloud model. Here lies VMware, the dominant x86 virtualization provider, as they have a complete set of products and 3rd party certified partners to help their customers go virtual. Let’s face it; ESX/ESXi and vCenter are excellent products. Additionally, VMware has introduced vCloud and vCloud Express “VMware Power. By the hour.” Essentially, this technology allows Enterprises to build a private cloud and Service Providers to build public clouds and to provide hybrid cloud offerings.
Of course, this pits Amazon’s Cloud Offerings, which are not built with VMware’s technology, against VMware and some of their most powerful partners. Amazon utilizes the Xen hypervisor along with other customized/internal solutions. Understanding that VMware is the dominant Enterprise x86 virtualization technology, Amazon has introduced VM Import. VM Import allows Enterprises to easily migrate VMware Guests (VMDK) into the Amazon EC2 Cloud.
However, what if I want to create a private EC2 within my Enterprise? Along comes Dell’s Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) infrastructure solution. Dell UEC combines the power of Dell’s server hardware with the software of Ubuntu Linux and Eucalyptus providing Enterprises with the same virtual machine images and management APIs that Amazon uses for EC2. Well it is not exactly EC2, as some will argue that Eucalyptus is not a full implementation of the EC2 API, and it is a matter of fact that Amazon has plenty of additional customized internal tools/systems that make EC2 a reality. Not to mention that EC2 relies on the Xen hypervisor while UEC utilizes KVM virtualization. All in all, it’s a great start.
As always, Dell has published an excellent UEC Reference Architecture White Paper for UEC Standard Edition. This begs the question whether or not Dell will offer Enterprise and/or Service Provider Editions of UEC. In any case, Dell now has a visionary offering that they will be able to evangelize to their current customers and prospects. In fact, as UEC matures, Dell is sure to add elements of their entire product portfolio; namely Compellent storage equipment, more powerful server platforms, and perhaps networking/storage hardware via their partnerships with Juniper, Brocade, and others.
One last thought, Dell has incredible flexibility in creating unique cloud offerings via simply changing software and hardware partners. For example, offering a solution based on Red Hat with Delta Cloud or perhaps a secondary UEC offering that utilizes OpenStack. This flexibility also translates to Dell’s Open Management philosophy, which is sure to attract additional software partners thereby creating a UEC partner ecosystem.
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