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back to article Speaking in Tech: We grill EMC's Mr VMWare

speaking_in_tech Greg Knieriemen podcast enterprise It's another enterprise and techcast with Greg Knieriemen, Ed Saipetch and Sarah Vela. This week, your hosts are grilling a special guest: EMC's Chad Sakac. Last night they spoke to the storage guru, prolific blogger and virtual geek – who become a senior veep at EMC in …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I assume the commoditization comments were...

    to comfort their former partner Cisco. SDN will absolutely commoditize network gear. Cisco never had any great advantages at the hardware level over the bulk of other networking companies, but their IOS and management tools were so ubiquitous that Cisco = networking. Remove the control panel from Cisco and allow intermixing of gear and there is no reason to pay 2x the price for a 10g interconnect (or whatever). SDN was a very good buy for VMware. Their gains will be at Cisco's expense.

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What was with the mainframe comment?

    Why wouldn't you want to buy a mainframe to run the "cloud"? What is the mainframe? The mainframe is a giant centrally controlled (by software) virtualized server which can rapidly deploy a number of different workload profiles very securely and reliably. That is the definition of a "private cloud"... IBM has just been building "private clouds" for the last 40 years. Apparently that flies in the face of the "cloud" marketing that "cloud" is all new. No, "cloud" is a reversion back to the mainframe paradigm. Client/server brought wide amounts of distribution of computing, "cloud" is bringing it all back into one large cluster. The "cloud" is a validation of the IBM mainframe model, centralized computing distributed to terminals (or thin-clients/tablets these days).

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    1. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      Re: What was with the mainframe comment?

      Almost.

      The "private cloud" is a validation of the mainframe model.

      The hype is about hybrid cloud. That's the game changer.

      Most people have the makings of a private cloud - a highly virtualised estate - they just need to properly manage and secure it. Then they can, if they choose, reap the benefits of the cloud computing paradigm.

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      1. Anonymous Coward
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        Anonymous Coward

        Re: What was with the mainframe comment?

        What do you mean by hybrid cloud? The definition I have heard of hybrid cloud is: a company that has some of their workload on a "private cloud" (compute, network, storage virtualization plus deployment automation) and some of their workload on a public cloud, such as Amazon EC2, IBM SmartCloud, Force.com, etc. I don't understand how EMC/VMware would have anything to do with hybrid cloud as they one offer the virtualization component of the private version, generally partner with BMC for the automation . How is hybrid cloud a game changer?

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        1. Pommy
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          Re: What was with the mainframe comment?

          Hybrid cloud from VMware's standpoint is the ability to run workloads privately and workloads in a public cloud, WHILE being able to migrate workloads between private and public seamlessly and still retaining the ability to chop and chose your public cloud provider (As long as they are built on VMware) and manage the whole lot from one management window.

          With public cloud venders like Amazon, you can’t do this, so you’re stuck with that one public cloud without the ability to move workloads from private to public and visa-versa along with separate management of public and private workloads.

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          1. Anonymous Coward
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            Anonymous Coward

            Re: What was with the mainframe comment?

            And there are loads of public cloud providers already...

            http://vcloud.vmware.com/vcloud-ecosystem#view=full

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          2. Anonymous Coward
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            Anonymous Coward

            Re: What was with the mainframe comment?

            "With public cloud venders like Amazon, you can’t do this, so you’re stuck with that one public cloud without the ability to move workloads from private to public and visa-versa along with separate management of public and private workloads."

            I guess the comment makes more sense given that definition. Everyone has these self-serving definitions of the cloud. For VMware, the cloud = virtualization, specifically buying more VMware licenses.... If VMware wants to create the ability to Vmotion workload from private to public, they are going to have to build their own public cloud. None of the major cloud providers are going to want to pay VMware licensing rates when they can get KVM or Xen for free and have the skills to maintain them. I can't imagine any public cloud, or large scale service provider (Google, Yahoo, etc) would use VMware. They would be uncompetitive, from a pricing perspective, with those that use open source.

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    2. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      Re: What was with the mainframe comment?

      What is the mainframe? Well, it's a very good platform but it's ancient, arcane and, more importantly, costly. The comment was right on the money, you'd have to be an insane mainframe fetishist to buy a huge, proprietary and costly box to run x86 workloads. No creative TCO or ROI can change that. The cloud is model is not about validating the mainframe model, it's about scale out computing and software that makes a large cluster of commodity hardware offer a reliable computing service to its users. Let's keep the mainframe to what it really was meant for, that is LEGACY applications for companies that find too risky to port ancient code to a different platform.

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      2. Anonymous Coward
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        Anonymous Coward

        Re: What was with the mainframe comment?

        Not the case. Mainframe software is costly, the z/OS, CICS, etc licenses. A mainframe, the physical hardware, is right in the range of a comparably sized x86 cluster, if not less costly. You can buy the base z114 for about $100,000. You can run RHEL licenses on that hardware for less than the cost of x86 (as a z processor is a massive throughput monster).... The mainframe is the only platform that is EAL5 secure, literally in a class of its own from a security perspective. The best feature, though, is that it just works. About a 30-50 year meantime between outages. You are not going to be able to achieve that level of uptime by assembling a bunch of non-integrated components made by companies that hate each other, e.g. RHEL and VMware, MS and VMware, Oracle and everyone.

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        1. Anonymous Coward
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          Anonymous Coward

          Re: What was with the mainframe comment?

          "Mainframe software is costly, the z/OS, CICS, etc licenses."

          PS - You do not need to use any of this software with System z running Linux. You would use the z/VM, mainframe hypervisor, which is markedly better than VMware (takes basically no management overhead), and then SLES or RHEL on top of the z IFL (integrated facility for linux, a specialty processor optimized for linux). No need to buy and spend time setting up clustering software, it has sysplex baked into the system. Not only is mainframe not more costly, but I would be amazed if it is not considerably less costly in scale after all of the x86 software has been added.

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