11.09.10
Am I backing the wrong horse?
There’s something which has been eating at me for a while now, it’s been there scratching away at the back of my mind like some gnawing bug but today it crystallised.
The event was an article in a news feed I get from SearchStorage. The article itself is an interesting piece on how NetApp are updating their mid-high end FAS arrays (OK it’s only interesting if you’re into storage subsystems!) but the key phrases which stood out were these:
“… and a FlexPod bundle that includes Cisco server and switching products and VMware server virtualization applications with the FAS3200″ “The FlexPod is an answer to EMC’s Vblock bundles that also include Cisco servers and switches and VMware software.”Here we have NetApp, a key performer at Microsoft’s Hosting Summit this year with all of the talk about “Cloud services” lining up a competitor to vBlock using VMware – one of the foundations stones of vBlock! The question I asked myself is this… Where the hell is Hyper-V?!
Over and over, I’m seeing cloud architectures and solution using VMware, the partners which Microsoft themselves have been sharing media time with have VMware solutions as their center-fold products in this space.And even where there IS a Microsoft program for the hardware vendors to tie in to, it’s a very interesting bit of reading when you do follow the vendor links placed there. Of all of the big names, I found 1 (one!) who had dedicated information for me to access related to the architectures the program refers too. All of the others followed the standard approach of ‘As part of the delivery of this program we’ll be using these great products which we sell <link><link><link>. There were no pre-validated configurations available which I could measure my requirements against!
I’m going to link HERE to the only decent landing page there was, it’s DELL. They had a single page, with some interesting and usable reference documentation at the bottom. Documentation which seemed to have bee written specifically for this program.
So here’s my issue, I like Hyper-V, I like the Systems Centre elements supporting it (VMM Self Service Portal v2 is sweet!) I’ve deployed or been part of project deploying, quite a number of environment delivering large-scale services running on Hyper-V, BUT VMware seems part of all of the ‘solutions’ which are coming forward. Am I backing the wrong horse??
Then I read this in RCPmag which, not for the first time, questioned what Microsoft actual strategy is in terms of ‘The Cloud” (I really do hope we can move away from that moniker soon!) and talks of the current moves simply being a ‘prevent’ rather than succeed plan. Whatever it is, it leave us, out here trying to build business cases and for strategies with our customers, scrabbling a little for something solid.
