Page 136 - 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

allow the creation of a hybrid Windows cloud and give Micro-
soft’s approach to virtualization an advantage over VMware’s.
VMware understands the link between enterprise virtual-
ization and cloud computing, but it is not a cloud supplier
itself. It is striving to generate a similar opportunity for its cus-
tomers by seeding clouds that are compatible with its virtual

machine format through vCloud Express. Announced in Sep-
tember, vCloud Express is a set of software and tools for a
cloud vendor to use in setting up low-end cloud services, in-
cluding self-provisioning, billing by the hour, and load bal-
ancing hundreds of VMware-based workloads. Terremark,
Bluelock, RightScale, and Hosting.com are all similar cloud
service providers or front ends to other service providers, who

say that they are implementing vCloud Express.
As a sign of how crucial success on this front is to VMware,
it has made public its vCloud application programming inter-
face (API), which specifies how any third party can connect to
a vCloud Express supplier. It submitted a specification for
vCloud Express to a standards body in the fall of 2009. That
body was the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF),
the same standards group that produced OVF. VMware’s sub-
mission makes its API a published specification that is headed

toward becoming a public standard, a step that it hasn’t taken
with its virtual machine file format and other proprietary tech-
nologies. The vCloud API is the first such API from any cloud
vendor to be submitted for standardization. (Fujitsu followed
with its cloud API in December.)
Other cloud suppliers are seeking to capitalize on VMware’s
support for cloud computing. AT&T Synaptic Compute cloud,

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