Page 118 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

MANA GEMENT STRATEGIES F O R THE CL OUD R EV OL UTION

Coming, an Explosion of Cloud Services

I’d like to cite one more development that makes me opti-
mistic about that possibility. VMware knows that Amazon’s
EC2 is the most popular cloud infrastructure and that Ama-
zon is seeking to convert the world to its own, not VMware’s,

virtual machine file format. VMware, in turn, is seeking to
start up more cloud suppliers that can support its Virtual
Machine Disk format (VMDK) files. VMware is trying to seed
public cloud services by providing prospective cloud vendors
with vCloud Express, a set of tools for allowing a new cloud
service to set up customer self-provisioning, pay-as-you-go
cloud services that run VMware virtual machines. VMware

knows that it will have an advantage over Amazon Web Serv-
ices if it can get cloud suppliers to do this, as IT managers are
already using its products in their data centers.
“This notion of federation—getting the internal and ex-
ternal resources to work together—we think that’s a differen-
tiator for VMware,” said VMware CEO Paul Maritz at his firm’s
user conference, VMworld, in September 2009. Information-
Week added its own analysis:

Although Maritz didn’t say so at the San Francisco event,
vCloud express is a counterstroke to the popular, easily
available Amazon EC2 cloud services. Amazon relies on
the open source Xen hypervisor to run workloads in its
cloud, not VMware’s product set. As a result EC2’s Ama-
zon Machine Image requires VMware customers to re-
cast their virtual machines in Amazon’s AMI.

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