So many choices ...

Analyst firm Forrester published an assessment report on private cloud software this week, and Platform Computing, with its ISF software, appears to have the most-complete offering based on Forrester’s criteria. For now.

The report’s authors, James Staten and Laura E. Nelson, ranked 16 private-cloud products across 10 criteria, giving each vendor a score ranging from zero to four in each category. By my count, Platform ISF scored a total of 26 points, with VMware, HP and IBM close on its heels with 25 points apiece. Abiquo also scored surprisingly well, while the other vendors — CA, Cloud.com, Dell, Enomaly, Eucalyptus, Hexagrid, Microsoft, newScale and Tibco — all scored from the teens into the low twenties.

Interestingly, Forrester didn’t tabulate and present these scores in the report, just the individual scores for each criterion. I’m guessing this was strategic because, as the authors note early on, “We’re just in the infancy of private cloud solutions. Many of the products now on the market are less than two years old, which means they have a ways to go on completeness, level of integration, and polish . . . .” They also point out that the private-cloud market double in size in the next year, with a number of products slated to be released by Red Hat, Nimbula, Cisco and others.

Forrester appears to take a view of private clouds similar to one that I took earlier this week, which is that it’s just too early to call any vendor dead or to proclaim any vendor the champion. It tried to objectively gauge where the market is right now, focusing on specific capabilities, while allowing plenty of room for growth across the board. I’m not particularly surprised by Platform’s relative success (see previous reporting on ISF) or that VMware scored high, but Forrester is correct in its assessment that a lot could change in a relatively short time as products evolve and new ones hit the market.

For anyone looking at private clouds today, this report is definitely worth a look. But know that nothing is static in cloud computing, so having a grasp on what you need now, what you’d like in the future and whether any given product will get there some day is critical.  If one product doesn’t fit your needs, another might. Or just wait a few months to see what’s new.

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Is Eucalyptus Dead in the Water?

There was a great debate last week on GigaOM Pro about the state of Eucalyptus Systems and whether its days as a purveyor of private-cloud software are numbered. Our Infrastructure curator, Paul Miller, suggested in his Weekly Update (sub req’d) that, after a few previous setbacks, Ubuntu’s decision to forgo further Eucalyptus support in favor of OpenStack in future versions of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud Linux operating system might be the death knell for Eucalyptus Systems’ private-cloud software.

Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos responded, stating that his company has had more than 25,000 downloads clouds based on its free version, and that, from his perspective, it’s stronger than ever. He also mentioned a number of big-name customers presently running production clouds based on Eucalyptus.

So did Cloudera CEO Mike Olson, who noted that his company is a very happy Eucalyptus customer. This is in part because of its Amazon Web Services API compatibility, and in part because of the qualities of the product and support for paid enterprise version of the Eucalyptus software. Olson’s most poignant comment might have been that “it’s way too early to nominate a single winner among the cloud abstraction layers. We need more years of experience before that happens.”

I’ve been critical of Eucalyptus chances, too — even suggesting at one point (sub req’d) that an acquisition might be all that could save it — but I’m starting to come around to Mickos’s point of view. His statements about Eucalyptus’s prospects are, of course, self-serving, but there’s no denying the numbers. Even if a majority of those 25,000 downloads clouds never amounted to anything substantial, some certainly did and will in the future. Yesterday, it announced European social-gaming company Plinga as a customer. And having large, publicly referenceable customers puts Eucalyptus ahead of many other private-cloud startups. Further, the company has continued to add personnel and expand globally, which probably aren’t signs of impending doom.

It’s a Broad — and Young — Market

But this isn’t just a discussion about Eucalyptus, it’s a discussion about the expectations for private clouds, in general. OpenStack has a lot of believers — and for good reason — but with the exceptions of Rackspace and Internap, there are no service providers that are known to be using the software for customer-facing services, and most private-cloud use cases appear only experimental at this point. As Mickos pointed out in his response to Miller’s analysis, Eucalyptus most commonly runs into VMware, Cloud.com, Abiquo and CA (with its 3Tera product, I presume) during customer engagements.

What this tells us is that, as Olson suggested, it’s too early to tell who (aside from VMware) will win in the private-cloud contest, even if some projects or companies have greater name recognition than do others. VMware is a household name and OpenStack is approaching that status, but Cloud.com, Abiquo and 3Tera are not. Yet, 3Tera was an early innovator in provisioning private clouds before CA bought it, Cloud.com is killing it with several very large customers under NDA, and even the relatively unknown Abiquo has a growing list of customers. Still under the radar, but not to be ignored, are startups such as Cloupia and Nimbula (which just became generally available in April), and large vendors with new cloud strategies, such as Red Hat, HP and Microsoft.

In fact, Nimbula Co-Founder and CEO Chris Pinkham insightfully mentioned to me during a recent conversation that the whole discussion about public clouds versus private clouds is just a debate over who owns the hardware. What customers really care about — or what they ultimately will really care about — he explained, is which product can best deliver a company’s services, regardless where the servers reside.

What he’s describing is the oft-mentioned but as of yet rarely implemented hybrid cloud. And despite some noteworthy efforts by pretty much everyone pitching private-cloud software, no one has this mastered yet. However, if you’ve looked at any cloud-adoption surveys lately, such as this one from the Open Group, you’ll find that hybrid clouds are all the rage among CIOs.

Yes, OpenStack has all the momentum right now, but it doesn’t obviate the need for other products, nor is it even a completed project. It’s a worthwhile exercise to handicap the private-cloud field, but with adoption still relatively low and looking to remain that way until enterprise-ready hybrid clouds become a reality, all we really have right now are actual customer wins and product roadmaps to determine who has the best chances. At this very-early point, a lot of products look promising, but there’s plenty of time for private-cloud pushers to distinguish themselves.

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As cloud computing industry watchers know, Eucalyptus was the first house on the block now populated by the likes of Cloud.com, Nimbula, Abiquo, OpenStack, VMware and others. VMware might have the biggest home, but it was Eucalyptus’s house where everyone hung out – at least until OpenStack moved in. The open source project, led by Rackspace, hijacked a good number of developers and highlighted a rift between Eucalyptus and its once-model customer NASA. According to reports, NASA found the Eucalyptus platform too inflexible in terms of scale and hackability, due to its “open core” nature.

Mickos thinks reports of this split were overblown. He told me NASA once made a statement that “we don’t think … was correct or relevant,” and the press ran with it. In fact, he pointed out, USAspending.gov is still hosted atop Eucalyptus within NASA’s Nebula cloud platform that serves government agencies. NASA has many cloud needs, he says, and the work it’s doing with OpenStack addresses just one of them. Furthermore, Mickos said Eucalyptus hasn’t found the limits of its scalability in its own testing, although he acknowledges it’s now up to the company to prove that.

Regarding OpenStack, it’s worth noting that, according to Mickos, the project already uses some core Eucalyptus technologies, and his company plans to contribute even more going forward. The two are somewhat strange bedfellows, considering Eucalyptus is currently focused on building a customer base for its free, open-source software, which is exactly what OpenStack intends to do when its platform is ready for production. One notable difference might be their target audiences: Eucalyptus targets enterprise customers, whereas OpenStack is built, at least, with service providers in mind.

Then there is the open core issue. Mickos reiterated to me that the vast majority of the Eucalyptus platform is open source, and that free, open-source deployments probably outnumber the open core Enterprise Edition, for which users must pay, “by a factor of a thousand.” Most Enterprise Edition customers, he said, buy it because it supports the VMware hypervisor, which means those customers have already conceded to some degree of lock-in. For those customers running KVM (e.g., Red Hat) or Xen hypervisors, the free, open-source version will do the trick more often than not. Downloads of the free version have been doubling annually, with 15,000 last month, Mickos added.

Long-term, the goal is widespread adoption of the paid Enterprise Edition, but now, Mickos said, it’s just a matter of spreading Eucalyptus use via partnerships with vendors such as Red Hat, Dell, HP and Canonical. As Mickos explained:

To be able to compete against giants in the industry, like VMware, you need to have a strong revenue model of your own in the open source business. Secondly, you must have a clear differentiation for customers, so they know what they’re getting when they pay for it.

He thinks Eucalyptus has both, and time will prove this strategy effective. Mickos knows a thing or two about building successful open-source companies, having led MySQL to web database ubiquity before Sun Microsystems bought it for $1 billion.

Getting back to Red Hat, Mickos calls it a “first step,” noting, “there’s much more that we can do with Red Hat and hope to do there.” What that means is unclear, although an OEM deal or even an acquisition doesn’t seem out of the question. As mentioned above, Red Hat needs a self-service IaaS component to round out its cloud portfolio, and Eucalyptus has proven itself in that regard. Assuming Eucalyptus doesn’t get absorbed into a large vendor’s cloud lineup (a possibility Mickos didn’t acknowledge when I asked the question), Mickos said, “As we see ourselves growing, I can very well see a scenario where there are pieces of technology that we would acquire.”

Either way, I think Eucalyptus needs to do something (subscription req’d). Its partner-centric focus might not fare well over the long run against whole-hog vendors such as VMware and Microsoft, or startups selling cloud-in-a-box software. Buying its way into a complete cloud vendor is one option, but there’s no shame in building the first real internal IaaS product and selling to a fellow open-source company like Red Hat, which will use it to power its fight against the growing number of hostile neighbors on the cloud computing block.

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Unlike some internal-cloud vendors that aim to replicate Amazon EC2 on-premise, Abiquo focuses on providing an enterprise-class IaaS experience. In Abiquo parlance, this means control at every layer: IT administrators, business units and individual users. Regardless where the cloud resources come from (on-premise, managed or the public cloud), Abiquo’s software maintains a safe separation and allows for tight policy control. That is, business units are broken down into distinct “virtual enterprises” that each have their own management views; business users have limited access within their virtual enterprises; and no one but IT has access to the underlying infrastructure. It’s certainly a unique, albeit somewhat limiting, approach to cloud management, and has attracted a few large users, including Ericsson and Telefonica.

As we’ve pointed out on several occasions, however, the internal, or private, cloud space is full of competition: VMware, CA, Nimbula, Eucalyptus, Cloud.com, and the list goes on. If it plays it cards right, Abiquo has as good a chance as anybody to cash in once organizations outside the service-provider community actually start investing in internal clouds.

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mCloud On-Demand lets users manage Amazon EC2 instances using the same dashboard, and receiving the same benefits, as the on-premise mCloud product. This means building in fault tolerance, creating three-tier web architectures and the use of a graphical design tool, among other things. However, mCloud On-Demand will soon be compatible with additional clouds — including OpenStack-based clouds (Morphlabs is a contributor) –enabling hybrid environments that span cloud providers and user data centers. “The message of mCloud On-Demand,” said Morphlabs founder and CEO Winston Damarillo, “is that your provider is just another source of virtual machines, and you can glue them however you want.”

Morphlabs’ other news is its partnership with Zend around the Zend Server web server for PHP applications. Through a technology integration, Zend will be able to bill mutual customers on a pay-per-use basis, as opposed to its current license model, with Morphlabs handling the metering aspect. Damarillo says Morphlabs is in talks to bring middleware providers and other application vendors into the fold, as well. He thinks, probably accurately, that ISVs will need a bridge to move to a cloud-like billing model, and cloud software providers are in a good position to provide this. Many public cloud providers (e.g., Rackspace, GoGrid and Heroku) offer partner marketplaces, but Morphlabs’ plan is fairly unique among cloud software vendors.

It’s this type of billing for traditional software products, as well as Morphlabs’ 1-cent-per-hour price tag for mCloud On-Demand, that might foretell the future of cloud pricing. For software vendors, it’s an opportunity to adapt to the cloud without much heavy lifting, and to potentially make more money. As Damarillo points out, using the retail vs. wholesale analogy, pay-per-use billing might actually earn software vendors more revenue depending on the price per hour and actual usage.

For cloud software providers like Morphlabs, the trick is getting customers in the door. At 1 cent per machine per hour, Morphlabs On-Demand won’t drive huge revenues except at a major scale, but it will attract users. It’s similar to Amazon Web Services’ recent decision to give away a year’s worth of Micro Instance use (sub req’d). Once they’re in, it’s easier to transition customers over to higher-profit offerings. What’s promising about the Morphlabs approach is that, unlike the free, stripped-down products offered by many cloud software startups, mCloud On-Demand is really cheap but full-strength in terms of features.

However, as I said upon Morphlabs’ product launch in April, it’s an innovative company in a crowded market. Low barriers to entry, a strong partner ecosystem and OpenStack compatibility won’t don’t hurt its chances, though.

To learn more about deploying the right cloud strategy for your needs, attend the free GigaOM Pro webinar, The Scalable Cloud. The webinar takes place at 10:00 a.m. PST on Nov. 4.

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Decoupling the Service Delivery Manager software is an important step, because it lets IBM compete across the board in the internal (or private) cloud market. CloudBurst appliances will sate customer demand for converged-infrastructure systems like those offered by Cisco, HP and Oracle, but they won’t appeal to customers not willing to lock themselves into the same vendor for computing, networking and storage: both hardware and management software.

With the standalone software offering, IBM can sell against vendors such as Dell and Egenera, for example, which are pushing open converged-infrastructure software, as well as against the growing number of software companies selling internal-cloud platform software. This group is wide-ranging, from startups like Cloud.com and DynamicOps to fellow Big Four systems management vendors CA Technologies and BMC Software.

Also notable is that the new Power 750-based appliance is certified to run SAP applications. IBM has focused its cloud computing strategy thus far on enterprise-class offerings, and SAP is very popular among enterprises, which might make the new CloudBurst appliance a strong candidate among enterprise customers.

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One is its evolution from an internally developed virtualization-management solution at megabank Credit Suisse into, a spinoff company selling that software to the greater IT community in 2008. Credit Suisse was managing thousands of virtual servers and desktops while DynamicOps’ underlying Virtual Resource Manager software was developed, so scalability isn’t an issue. In fact, said VP of Marketing Rich Bordeaux, one customer currently manages 30,000 VMs and virtual desktops and is looking to have more than 60,000 within 18 months.

Furthermore, because the bank wasn’t about to move certain application from physical servers, physical-resource management is inherent in the Cloud Automation Manager. The new features in Cloud Automation Manager are what make it truly cloudy, though: multitenancy, self-service provisioning, and the ability to provision and manage resources from Amazon EC2.

DynamicOps’ other ace is that Cloud Automation Manager is an integral part of Dell’s recently announced Virtual Integrated System (VIS) offering. The DynamicOps software is the foundation of the VIS Self-Service Creator component. VIS is Dell’s attempt to combat competitors’ converged infrastructure solutions (e.g., Cisco UCS and HP BladeMatrix), so such an OEM deal should help validate DynamicOps’ claims of enterprise-readiness (if the Credit Suisse heritage doesn’t already do so).

Of course, it’s hard to get too excited about any cloud software right now before organizations actually start buying it. Web hosts and MSPs have been buying up software from vendors like VMware, Cloud.com and 3tera, but most other businesses appear to be doing no more than dipping their toes in the water right now.  DynamicOps has a strong virtualization-management history, though, and an existing customer base to tout (and sell), so perhaps it can break in where others appear to be left outside.

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With this in mind, customers need to consider many things, and we profiled numerous solutions and companies to create a guide for deploying the right cloud solution to the right enterprise. We examined cloud application platforms, hypervisor-based clouds, internal infrastructure-as-a-service clouds, and high-performance computing clouds, in addition to looking at hybrid cloud solutions and underlying server architecture. Companies profiled include Appistry, Red Hat, Microsoft, VMware and CA Technologies, among others.

What sets apart Elastra’s approach is its focus on application needs as opposed to just server utilization rates. After Elastra’s ECML and EDML markup languages determine application and resource properties, respectively, the Plan Composer function lets customers set their own policies based on application needs and specific power metrics (such as wattage, PUE, number of cores, etc.). Therefore, if an application requires 4GB of RAM and two cores for optimal performance, and if the customer is concerned with straight wattage, Elastra’s product will automatically route it to the lowest-power 4GB, dual-core virtual machine available.

While server virtualization and efficient hardware reduce the total cost of maintaining the status quo, this new breed of software solutions shaves off additional dollars by using such resources as efficiently as possible — all without the need for human intervention. The main drawback for customers, however, is that they’re tethered to cutting-edge internal cloud platforms, which many people are still afraid of — just ask the now-defunct Cassatt. As interest in internal clouds and Green IT continue to rise, these solutions will become more than good stories to tell and we can see real-world examples of how much money they actually can save.

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