Red Hat’s decision to buy ManageIQ, announced Thursday, gives it a stronger cross-cloud management story. ManageIQ, already a Red Hat partner, works with Red Hat’s CloudForms and Red Hat’s KVM-centric enterprise virtualization software but also with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure public clouds.

As InformationWeek reported when the deal was announced on Thursday:

“The acquisition is aimed at making Red Hat a stronger player in the creation of multi-hypervisor, on-premises clouds capable of working with various public cloud services. ManageIQ workloads can be configured to run via Amazon Web Services EC2 or Microsoft Azure.”

Planned support for the Xen-based Rackspace Cloud gives ManageIQ total hypervisor coverage.

This sort of multi-vendor kumbaya message is getting more important as customers evaluating cloud deployment want to be assured they won’t be locked into a single-vendor, single-technology-stack solution.

VMware also touted that rationale of heterogeneous support when it acquired DynamicOps last summer.

No surprise: AWS reigns supreme for developers

The vast majority (more than 70 percent) of developers surveyed by Forrester Research use Amazon EC2 for custom app development.  Microsoft Windows Azure came in a distant second at 25 percent; with Google and Force.com following close behind that.  This according to 106 developers participating in Forrester’s Global Cloud Developer Online survey.

And, of those EC2 users,  about 19 percent said they expected their usage would hang steady over the next 12 months, roughly 12 percent said it would shrink and 43 percent expect it to grow. (See chart below.) Among those using Azure about 5 percent said their usage of that platform would shrink — about the same percentage thought it would stay the same, and about 19 percent expect their Azure use to grow.

Amazon rolls out fat new instance type, Data Pipeline

Amazon had a busy pre-Christmas week. On Friday, it launched its promised Data Pipeline service. And to keep those aforementioned EC2-mad developers happy it also came out with a big new EC2 instance type for data intensive applications. The new High Storage Eight Extra Large instances suit applications requiring high storage depth and high sequential I/O performance.

Such applications include data warehousing and log processing. For those with short memories, Amazon announced its Redshift data warehousing service at AWS: Reinvent in November. taken together, the Data Pipeline and Redshift could be a potent combination in Amazon’s quest to provide a platform for enterprise-class data warehouse applications –taking on such legacy giants as Oracle, Teradata, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM.

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VMware CEO Paul Maritz

Updated: VMware has acquired DynamicOps, a Burlington, Mass.-based cloud computing startup that spun out of banking giant Credit Suisse’s IT department in 2008. DynamicOps began as a virtualization-management vendor, but ventured into the private-cloud space in 2010 and later entered an OEM deal with Dell to serve as the self-service component of Dell’s Virtual Integrated System software suite.

VMware clearly expects DynamicOps to let the virtualization leader keep its upper hand as commodization of and diversification in the hypervisor space forces VMware to shift its pricing model away from licensing virtual machines. From the press release announcing the acquisition:

VMware believes that customers will benefit most by a standardized architecture, but will build solutions that make it easy for customers to choose the model that best works for their needs, including heterogeneous environments/management. … DynamicOps builds on the capabilities of vCloud Director by enabling customers to consume multi-cloud resources (e.g., physical environments, Hyper-V- and Xen-based hypervisors, and Amazon EC2).

The acquisition (rumors of which have been floating around for months) makes a lot of sense given VMware’s push up the stack from being a provider of server virtualization to being the management layer for the software-defined data center. The company needs to care a lot less about what’s running at the infrastructure level and a lot more about enabling a new class of applications to run dynamically atop those resources. DynamicOps furthers this vision by opening VMware’s doors to customers running competitive virtualization software and using Amazon’s cloud that competes with VMware’s vCloud strategy.

Update: Deals of the term were undisclosed, although sources tell me the sale price was between $100 million and $150 million, and probably closer to the top half of that range. DynamicOps had raised $16.3 million in venture capital, including $5.3 million from Intel Capital in September 2011 and $11 million from Sierra Ventures, Next World Capital and investment bank Credit Suisse in February 2011.

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That DynamicOps has an existing customer base to which it can pitch its Cloud Automation Manager distinguishes it from most private-cloud startups that must start their sales efforts from Step 1. I noted in my earlier post that DynamicOps was able to build a solid customer base for its virtualization management software, Virtual Resource Manager, based in part on its already having been proven within Credit Suisse. As VP of Marketing Rich Bordeaux told me then, one customer currently manages 30,000 VMs and virtual desktops and is looking to have more than 60,000 within 18 months. Now, it has $11 million more “to fund global sales, marketing and development of its private cloud automation solutions.”

But the disclaimer that applies to all private-cloud efforts — be it Cloud.com, Nimbula, Abiquo, Eucalyptus or whomever — applies to DynamicOps, as well, which is that we’ve still yet to see any real uptake (publicly, at least) of these products beyond service providers and some proofs-of-concept within traditional businesses.  The technology is generally innovative, and surveys regularly show relatively high interest in private cloud overs public clouds, so it seems like mainstream adoption shouldn’t be too far out. It wouldn’t too surprising to see DynamicOps be the company to break through — even beyond the users it garners through the Dell integration — but we’re still waiting for evidence that anybody can.

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Here are the companies I think Dell should consider buying this time around. They’re not huge companies by any stretch of the imagination, but they would provide very-relevant software products for advancing Dell’s mission of adding value to the growing number of servers it’s selling:

Aster Data Systems

Thus far, Dell has about the same in-house big data prowess as does HP, which is to say none at all. But Dell does resell Aster Data Systems’ nCluster massively parallel analytic database as a part of the Dell Cloud Solution for Data Analytics. That’s why I think Aster Data would be a natural fit for Dell: It already knows the product and the business, and it lets Dell keep selling commodity boxes while letting the software do the work. Dell pushes openness in terms of hardware choice, so if it wants to get into database space, buying a company with an appliance business might not make too much sense. Aster Data won’t come cheap, with a rumored valuation easily north of $100 million, but it should cost less than the $300 million-plus EMC reportedly paid for Greenplum, and certainly less than the $1.7 billion IBM paid for Netezza.

Joyent

Joyent would let Dell kill three birds with one stone, as it encompasses software, cloud computing and data centers. Furthermore, as with Aster Data, Dell already has an OEM deal with Joyent through which it resells Joyent’s SmartDataCenter software as the Dell Cloud Solution for Web Applications. As I’ve written before, Dell has formed a fairly holistic portfolio of cloud offerings, of which Joyent is a key part, so closing the loop and bringing that software in-house makes sense. It also would be good for Joyent, which would have a larger channel and sales team through which to sell its software. Of course, Joyent’s business also extends into cloud hosting, which would get Dell into the service-provider business, as some have speculated it wants to do, without buying Rackspace (which could be a complex integration) or relying on the Windows Azure Appliance.

DynamicOps

DynamicOps presents a similar situation as both Aster Data and Joyent, because Dell also has an OEM deal with it, although DynamicOps’ deal with Dell definitely is more limited in scope. Presently, its cloud-management software provides the self-service capability for Dell’s Virtual Integrated System software package, which is Dell’s attempt to give customers the converged infrastructure experience of managing computing, storage and networking from one place without forcing them to buy expensive vertically integrated systems such as Cisco’s UCS or HP’s BladeSystem Matrix. DynamicOps also sells virtualization management software, which would give Dell customers that aren’t ready for the cloud a more down-to-earth option.

Univa

Univa could be a good choice, especially if Dell wants to provide its Data Center Solutions customers, who buy large quantities of customized hyperscale servers from Dell, with tools to manage their scale-out data centers and clusters. Univa is a newly technology-rich company thanks to its forking of the Sun Grid Engine software, and it already has an Austin, Texas office as a result of its purchase of United Devices a few years ago. There are other options in this space – Platform Computing (which Morgan suggested) and Adaptive Computing – come to mind, but I think Univa’s Austin roots and relatively low price will make it the most-appealing choice of the three HPC vendors that have expanded into the cloud-data-center-management space.

Appistry

As with the other four suggestions, Appistry is another software company that’s a perfect complement for Dell’s scale-out-focused Data Center Solutions group. Appistry’s CloudIQ Platform is all about achieving high application performance across a distributed set of commodity servers, and it already has established a fairly strong customer base across the intelligence and defense industries. The companies already have partnered, in fact, on a petabyte-scale Private Storage Cloud that combines Appistry’s CloudIQ Storage software with Dell hardware. CloudIQ Storage would give Dell a differentiating story for customers, as it focuses on not just on scaling out, but also on placing data near computing logic to ensure that storage doesn’t slow application performance as the numbers of servers grows.

Image courtesy of Flickr user tanakawho.

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