Greg Ness

As Amazon (AMZN) continues with its amazing public cloud momentum, Palo Alto-based VMware (VMW) has stepped up its efforts to educate the industry about an even more powerful and disruptive form of cloud computing, called hybrid cloud. According to VMware, hybrid cloud promises to be an upcoming disruption in how applications and services are delivered by enterprises of all sizes. Today there are plenty of flavors of hybrid cloud circulating today in the blogosphere.  Some vendors have advocated a hybrid cloud vision which is hardly visionary: merely two separate clouds managed by a single organization, perhaps with some minimal application portability between them or even SaaS being delivered via a private cloud.  That definition of hybrid cloud isn’t particularly powerful or even interesting. At best it is a convenient trivialization of something that will ultima... (more)

Accelerating the Hybrid Cloud

Last night CloudVelocity CEO Rajeev Chawla was able to talk to Brian Gracely at The Cloudcast on CloudVelocity and the hybrid cloud. The 33 minute interview (Accelerating the Hybrid Cloud (#83) is now available for download.  A special thanks to Brian, who asked some of the most probing hybrid cloud questions asked by anyone to date.  Here is the outline of the conversation (created by the team at CloudCast) so that you can navigate to the part that you are most interested in (if you don’t have time for the entire interview): Description: Brian talks with Rajeev Chawla (CEO @ Clo... (more)

Hybrid Cloud: The Ultimate Silo-Buster

After completing Hybrid Cloud will Transform Disaster Recovery the broader implications of the seamless integration of IaaS with the data center became obvious: the hardware-bound silos of IT will be significantly eroded by the increasing agility, protection AND control delivered by the hybrid cloud. There will still be enterprise hardware spend and the required “specialized expertise” tied to vendor training and certifications, yet that spend and expert population will shrink over the next five years, replaced over time by an influx of IT architects, strategists and generalists w... (more)

VMware Crosses the Rubicon Redux

VMware's (VMW) recent hybrid cloud announcement was both expected and yet provocative. It falls into a pattern of successful moves made in virtualization security and networking as the company to grow its addressable market by virtualizing servers and delivering increased IT agility, efficiency and economy. In 2009 I talked about how VMware, through acquisitions and engineering, entered the security space despite a robust virtualization security ecosystem (see VMware Crosses the Rubicon - March 2009). VMware was threatened then by the new security challenges being brought into t... (more)

Cloud Migration Without Integration is a Dead End

Today there is a war being fought between Amazon AWS and the enterprise over the future direction of the IT industry.  Amazon promotes the public cloud as a destination, a primary and permanent facility for a company’s IT infrastructure; while enterprises today are mostly interested in cloud as a secondary facility used as needed, for everything from cloud devtest to cloud continuity and ultimately emerging “cloud on demand” operating models. This war is completely unnecessary.  A cloud (zone) is not optimum as a fixed, permanent enterprise app and service delivery destination. Th... (more)