VMware's Paul Maritz hands off the Software-Defined Data Center

Today is the last day of Paul Maritz's job as CEO of VMware.  Some have speculated that Paul's move to EMC corporate was a demotion.  When I hear this, I immediately tell people no way was Paul demoted.  I was lucky to work at Microsoft at the time when Paul was considered the #3 man, behind Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.  Yes, the CEO of VMware was the #3 man at Microsoft, and if still there would be the #2 man or #1 if Steve Ballmer left.  But, that would assume Paul survived the political changes at Microsoft.

Paul will be back home in Pacific Northwest.  Paul would fly on the Alaska Air flight regularly from Seattle to SJC, and then fly home.  I've seen him on the flight and many other VMware employees.  Now, Paul can go back to having Seattle as his base, taking the Seattle to Boston flight to EMC, but at least not every week to EMC HQ.

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Paul's finishing deliverable is the Software-defined data center.

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CIO.com writes a bit more background on Paul's background.

Filling Maritz's shoes will be no easy task. Maritz has long been a luminary of the industry. He was president and general manager of EMC's Cloud Computing Division before his appointment as CEO of VMware in 2008. Prior to that, he spent 14 years at Microsoft and was widely regarded as the third-ranking executive at the software behemoth, behind Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. He was in charge of Microsoft's desktop and server software, overseeing the development of Windows 95, Windows NT and Internet Explorer.

During his four years as CEO of VMware, Maritz helped dramatically increase the company's fortunes. When he took charge in 2008, about 25 percent of the world's Intel-based applications were running on a virtualized base. Four years later, that figure is 60 percent. In that same period, the number of VMware certified professionals has risen from 25,000 to 125,000.

"Back in 2008, we were asking ourselves what the hell is it," Maritz said of cloud computing. "Now we're asking ourselves: What do we do about it? How do we actually implement it? How do you transform your operations to take full advantage of it? What's going to happen in four years' time? Where are we going with this technology?"

 

VMware joins Openstack, who is next?

GigaOm's Barb Darrow reports on VMware joining Openstack.

Surprise! VMware will join OpenStack

Never say never. VMware is about to join the OpenStack Foundation, a group initially backed by other industry giants as a counterweight to VMware’s server virtualization dominance. Intel and NEC are also on deck to join as Gold OSF members.

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Just in time for VMworld, VMware is about to join the OpenStack Foundation as a Gold member, along with Intel and NEC, according to a post on the OpenStack Foundation Wiki.  The applications for membership are on the agenda of the August 28 OpenStack Foundation meeting.

The guys at VMware figured its worth the money to play in a group that was started as an anti-VMware solution.

OpenStack Gold members, which include Cloudscaling, Dell, MorphLabs, Cisco Systems, and NetApp, pay a fee pegged at 0.25 percent of their revenue — at least $50,000 but capped at $200,000 according to the foundation wiki.  (VMware’s fee will be $66,666, according to the application, submitted by VMware CTO Steve Herrod, which is linked on the wiki post.) Platinum members —  AT&T, Canonical, HP, Rackspace, IBM, Nebula, Red Hat, and SUSE – pay $500,000 per year with a 3-year minimum commitment.

Who else is next to join Openstack?  

When Rackspace and NASA launched the OpenStack Project more than two years ago, it was seen as a competitive response to VMware’s server virtualization dominance inside company data centers and to Amazon’s heft in public cloud computing.

Amazon makes Cold Storage sexy, Glacier has a bunch of chatter

I saw the Amazon Glacier announcement and decided to watch how things progress.

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The news is pretty high.

Amazon Glacier Offers Low-Cost Data Archiving

InformationWeek - ‎2 hours ago‎
Amazon Web Services expanded its cloud services portfolio Tuesday with the launch of Amazon Glacier, a low-cost archiving option. Befitting its chilly namesake, the new service aims to be the data equivalent of cryogenic storage--that is, it's designed for ...
 

Amazon Launches Glacier Data Archiving and Backup Service

TalkinCloud (blog) - ‎2 hours ago‎
Amazon isn't pulling any punches as it launches Glacier either. According to the cloud provider, “companies typically overpay for data archiving” due to required upfront payments and their inability to accurately guess what their capacity requirements will be.
 

Amazon launches Glacier cloud storage, hopes enterprise will go cold on tape use

ZDNet - ‎Aug 21, 2012‎
"Using Amazon Glacier... unlimited archival storage is available to [AWS customers] with a familiar pay-as-you-go model," Werner Vogels, the company's chief technology officer, wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. "The service redundantly stores data in multiple ...
 

Amazon Glacier: Low-Cost Cloud Archiving, But Not If Data Needs Occasional ...

CRN - ‎15 hours ago‎
Amazon Glacier is slated to be a highly reliable service. AWS claims average annual durability of 99.999999999 percent, or 11 nines of availability, which is the same durability as that of its Amazon S3 standard storage. Amazon estimated that a durability of ...
 

Amazon Glacier: Back Up All Your Data for Pennies a Month

Wired News - ‎21 hours ago‎
Amazon Glacier, as the new service is known, stores a copy of your data in archived format for less than a penny per gigabyte per month. The only catch is that getting the data back out can take some time since Glacier is primarily intended for backup and ...
 

Is There a Landmine Hidden in Amazon's Glacier?

Wired News - ‎19 hours ago‎
On Tuesday, Amazon unveiled a new online storage service known as Glacier. It's called Glacier because it deals in “cold storage” — i.e., the long-term storage of things like medical records or financial documents that you may need to archive for regulatory ...

But what I am finding even more interesting is the twitter traffic. "amazon glacier" is getting a fair amount of tweets per minute.

Amazon Glacier punts cloud-based backup at enterprise

 
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アマゾン、低価格アーカイブサービス Amazon Glacier を開始。GBあたり月1円以下さんから 氷河だけに凍りそうなアクセス時間…

 
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Llega Amazon Glacier, un servicio cloud low cost

 
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Is There a Landmine Hidden in Amazon’s Glacier?

 
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[Digital Inspiration] Amazon Glacier – The Most Affordable Online Backup Service Ever!  via 

Netflix sets Chaos Monkey free for all to use, next comes more monkeys - latency, conformity, doctor, janitor, security, 10-18, and Chaos Gorilla

Netfilx has been getting more and more attention, and I think part of that reason is they talk about things that go wrong, things that they have learned from.  Netflix has learned the lesson that people listen much more when you talk about your mistakes then when you self promote your error free ways.

Netflix's latest move is to release Chaos Monkey to the open source community.  Here is their blog post.

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Chaos Monkey released into the wild

We have found that the best defense against major unexpected failures is to fail often. By frequently causing failures, we force our services to be built in a way that is more resilient. We are excited to make a long-awaited announcement today that will help others who embrace this approach.
We have written about our Simian Army in the past and we are now proud to announce that the source code for the founding member of the Simian Army, Chaos Monkey,is available to the community.
Do you think your applications can handle a troop of mischievous monkeys loose in your infrastructure? Now you can find out.

What is Chaos Monkey?

Chaos Monkey is a service which runs in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) that seeks out Auto Scaling Groups (ASGs) and terminates instances (virtual machines) per group. The software design is flexible enough to work with other cloud providers or instance groupings and can be enhanced to add that support. The service has a configurable schedule that, by default, runs on non-holiday weekdays between 9am and 3pm. In most cases, we have designed our applications to continue working when an instance goes offline, but in those special cases that they don't, we want to make sure there are people around to resolve and learn from any problems. With this in mind, Chaos Monkey only runs within a limited set of hours with the intent that engineers will be alert and able to respond.
There are more Monkeys coming from the Simian Army.
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Inspired by the success of the Chaos Monkey, we’ve started creating new simians that induce various kinds of failures, or detect abnormal conditions, and test our ability to survive them; a virtual Simian Army to keep our cloud safe, secure, and highly available.

Latency Monkey induces artificial delays in our RESTful client-server communication layer to simulate service degradation and measures if upstream services respond appropriately. In addition, by making very large delays, we can simulate a node or even an entire service downtime (and test our ability to survive it) without physically bringing these instances down. This can be particularly useful when testing the fault-tolerance of a new service by simulating the failure of its dependencies, without making these dependencies unavailable to the rest of the system.

Conformity Monkey finds instances that don’t adhere to best-practices and shuts them down. For example, we know that if we find instances that don’t belong to an auto-scaling group, that’s trouble waiting to happen. We shut them down to give the service owner the opportunity to re-launch them properly.

Doctor Monkey taps into health checks that run on each instance as well as monitors other external signs of health (e.g. CPU load) to detect unhealthy instances. Once unhealthy instances are detected, they are removed from service and after giving the service owners time to root-cause the problem, are eventually terminated.

Janitor Monkey ensures that our cloud environment is running free of clutter and waste. It searches for unused resources and disposes of them.

Security Monkey is an extension of Conformity Monkey. It finds security violations or vulnerabilities, such as improperly configured AWS security groups, and terminates the offending instances. It also ensures that all our SSL and DRM certificates are valid and are not coming up for renewal.

10-18 Monkey (short for Localization-Internationalization, or l10n-i18n) detects configuration and run time problems in instances serving customers in multiple geographic regions, using different languages and character sets.

Chaos Gorilla is similar to Chaos Monkey, but simulates an outage of an entire Amazon availability zone. We want to verify that our services automatically re-balance to the functional availability zones without user-visible impact or manual intervention.

Oracle acquires Virtual Network Company Xsigo

It's tough being a network company.  Why?  Because VMware buys Ncira, and now Oracle buys Xsigo.

Oracle Buys Xsigo

Extends Oracle's Virtualization Capabilities with Leading Software-Defined Networking Technology for Cloud Environments

Redwood Shores, Calif. – July 30, 2012

News Facts

Oracle today announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Xsigo Systems, a leading provider of network virtualization technology.
Xsigo’s software-defined networking technology simplifies cloud infrastructure and operations by allowing customers to dynamically and flexibly connect any server to any network and storage, resulting in increased asset utilization and application performance while reducing cost.
The company’s products have been deployed at hundreds of enterprise customers including British Telecom, eBay, Softbank and Verizon.
The combination of Xsigo for network virtualization and Oracle VM for server virtualization is expected to deliver a complete set of virtualization capabilities for cloud environments.
Terms of the agreement were not disclosed. More information on this announcement can be found at oracle.com/xsigo.

Supporting Quotes

"The proliferation of virtualized servers in the last few years has made the virtualization of the supporting network connections essential," said John Fowler, Oracle Executive Vice President of Systems. "With Xsigo, customers can reduce the complexity and simplify management of their clouds by delivering compute, storage and network resources that can be dynamically reallocated on-demand."
"Customers are focused on reducing costs and improving utilization of their network," said Lloyd Carney, Xsigo CEO. "Virtualization of these resources allows customers to scale compute and storage for their public and private clouds while matching network capacity as demand dictates."

By the way the press releases reads you would think VMware would be one  buying Xsigo and not Oracle.