VMware's super-secret MARVIN: It's software-defined war on future IT The virtualisation community is all atwitter with speculation about VMware's MARVIN. MARVIN, for those who don't know, is supposedly VMware's hardware'n'software answer to hyper-converged competitors like Nutanix. Everyone has an opinion, and everyone has a theory – but VMware itself is carefully keeping schtum. I have some …
I see that VCE, named as a competitor of VMware along with Simplivity and Nutanix, is actually owned by EMC and VMware, like Pivotal, but also by Cisco and Intel. This is starting to get a little confusing. But I suppose it's a good idea for VMware to have its toe in the converged future.
From the article: "the tidbit that is most likely at the core of MARVIN – VSAN – is the political equivalent of a live wire."
So yes, confusing. And highly, highly political, and you sir have struck to the heart of it. Also remember that EMC has ScaleIO, and Cisco is buying up array vendors. Add in FlexPod, and the fact that other converged competitors (Nutanix, SimpliVity, Maxta, etc) all run on VMware (as at least one of the options) and you get a glimpse of the politics.
Now go beyond storage. Pivotal makes what amounts to wickedawesome orchestration software. In some senses that competes directly with VMware's own offerings in the area. And EMC? Where are they? They can't sell "just storage" for more than another 5-10 years, so they have to have strategic moves beyond the creation of the EMC federation.
EMC federation companies cooperate and compete, even as they own bits of eachother. Nutanix, SimpliVity, Maxta and so forth are official partners of EMC federation companies, as well as vicious competitors.
Dell has launched a tight tie-up with Nutanix, but is also "100% committed to VSAN". Supermicro makes Nutanix's hardware, which Dell will be selling for several months until they get their own nodes done, at which point Nutanix will still sell Supermicro-sourced nodes. Meanwhile, Supermicro looks to be at the core of MARVIN, and has several "VSAN ready nodes" on the VSAN list, as do Dell, HP and so forth.
And what about HP? They have StorSimple and Lefthand and are trying to make a go of all sorts of things. They sell VSAN nodes and VMware, but also crank out 3PAR and are a leading force behind Openstack. They are looking to become a major cloud provider via Openstack.
"Complicated" doesn't even begin to cover it. These companies are big enough to be competing internally. When you start to try to pick out the complex interrelationships even amongst members of allied companies like the EMC federation it gets hard. Try to look at alliances of convenience like VCE and you'll go mad.
Wheeee...this is what I do for a living now! (It's still better than troubleshooting Xerox printers.)
But if all the intertwined tentacles can get unknotted, and we can move away from this wild west gold rush type landscape that is the cloud market at the moment towards something more settled (which we inevitably will), this is something to really take note of. I posted a couple of days ago about VMWare having offered virtualised mainframe solutions for ages, but if they play their cards right and really build on their vastly superior experience with virtualisation tech, and don't get too greedy too soon as they compete for market share, I could see that this might be a major opportunity for them to become the winner here.
Although it's a shame they chose that name, I was hoping for it to be used by Google for a security focused update of their mobile / tablet OS.
StorSimple was acquired by Microsoft a couple years ago. HP has StoreEasy as their brand name for their windows-based NAS appliances/gateways(not the sort of thing I think that would be competing in this space). StorSimple is for sure not a competitor to any of these products they are more of a file serving engine with a cloud back end, not transactional.
Maybe you were thinking of StoreVirtual (as in VSA) though you did mention Lefthand (maybe you were referring to that as the hardware appliances).
I suppose it's news like this is why I haven't read vmware related blogs in a few years now, none of it excites me even remotely. This does though
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFjDvbDsyyg&list=UUPjct9StU5Ts4flkRnzEbSQ&index=19
I'll be happy when I get my 4-node 3PAR 7450 though.
You're absolutely, 100% right. I got StorSimple and StoreVirtual mixed up. Sorry, I've been working with startups all day that are building StorSimple competitors and the dang thing stuck in my mind.
Why the heck does everyone have to name everything so bloody similar? Maybe we should start naming the next generation of products in Klingon, I think we're running out of horrible manglings of English.
The mid market and below has been nearly ignored for a business in a box solution that is relatively inexpensive and runs some number of VM's and ties into the public cloud when needed. If Marvin isn't the answer to that need and wide open market, I'd be very surprised. Here ya go, buy this box, it has all the compute and storage you need to play automated data center like the big boys and if you need more of anything, just ask, it's right there at the end of the tether into our cloud.
Some of the other articles about Marvin have included speculation that VMware would start selling hardware nodes with VMware software preinstalled - including the new VSAN product - as part of it, since that's what the companies it is seen as competing with are doing.
But it seems unnatural for VMware to get into the hardware business.
There is a way they could get involved with hardware without actually selling any. Maybe they're planning to do an Android Silver.
That would probably also be insane, given that hardware suppliers are their customers, but it's an in-between alternative that I'm surprised has not been noted.
Great article, and spot on about almost everything. Our CTO David Cauthron wrote a blog post this morning linking to your article - the blog is here: http://www.nimboxx.com/company/newsroom/blog/marvin-shmarvin
It ends with:
"If speculation about Marvin is near reality, we already released that concept car (as Trevor refers to it) in June, only with unprecedented I/O performance and no VMware licenses. We’ve built the atomic unit of the software-defined data center – the building block of the public cloud model used by Google and Amazon. And we don’t have a troublesome billion-dollar SAN business distracting and holding us back, this is all we sell."
Trevor, I would love to hear your thoughts on this. No anonymous posting here - full disclosure, I work for NIMBOXX, obviously a competitor to this Marvin thing.
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