According to a press release announcing the news

“Red Hat Storage brings enterprise-class features to big data environments, such as Geo replication, High Availability, POSIX compliance, disaster recovery, and management, without compromising API compatibility and data locality. Customers now have a unified data and scale out storage software platform to accommodate files and objects deployed across physical, virtual, public and hybrid cloud resources.”

Because it’s fully distributed, Red Hat’s file system does away with the NameNode that keeps track of data in most Hadoop clusters and can be both a bottleneck and a single point of failure. (Although, the Hadoop community has mitigated some of these concerns with Apache Hadoop 2.0 (as has Facebook with its own engineering effort called AvatarNode).) Red Hat has also combined its storage and virtualization technologies so anyone using both can have virtual pool of storage and compute resources residing on the same physical infrastructure.

Red Hat isn’t the only company or organization trying eliminate problems associated with HDFS or to improve its utility to large enterprises and/or webscale companies. Companies such EMC, NetApp and others are offering their own alternatives, and Quantcast actually built and open sourced its own version of HDFS called the Quantcast File System. As we’ll be discussing at Structure: Data next month, Hadoop’s future prospects will be determined by how applicable it is to the workloads companies want to run, and some of the HDFS alternatives might represent solid options for enterprise workloads until Apache Hadoop can catch up.

Of course, Red Hat being Red Hat, Wednesday’s news isn’t all about big data. The company makes it pretty clear that it expects its Hadoop efforts to be part of a broader cloud computing push, in which companies can run their applications in big data environments that span private and public resources, including OpenStack and the Amazon Web Services clouds.

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The OpenNebulaApps tools were previously available only to OpenNebulaPro customers but, according to project director Ignacio Llorente, OpenNebula realized there was more value in opening them up:

“Most customers are interested in our enterprise support – they want us to provide them with commercial support and a service-level agreement. These components weren’t so important for them, so we realized it was more important for us to release these components to the community, to compete [with OpenStack, Eucalyptus etc].

“As we are an open-source community, it is much easier for us and our customers to be fully open-source and not to have special add-ons only available for customers. We have a quality assurance process for all open-source technology and also have the community as testers.”

There are three tools in the OpenNebulaApps collection: AppStage allows automated software stack installation and configuration for virtual machines (VMs); AppFlow is for automatically executing and managing multi-tiered applications that consist of interconnected VMs; and AppMarket lets users build and deploy private marketplaces, so that users can share virtual appliances across multiple OpenNebula instances.

The suite is being released under the Apache license and will become part of the main OpenNebula distribution. It’s not the first move OpenNebula has made recently to boost enterprise uptake by opening up functionality to more users: a couple of weeks ago, sponsor company C12G said the community would get access to every maintenance release and service pack.

Llorente described the target users of this latest release as enterprises that see cloud computing as an extension of data center virtualization and that want to, for example, use the VMware hypervisor while avoiding the vCloud VMware component because OpenNebula is “more cost-effective” and supports other hypervisors as well. He suggested that this was a different type of customer from those who want to build an Amazon Web Services-like cloud on-premises.

“While OpenStack and Eucalyptus can be seen as an open source incarnation of the Amazon cloud model, OpenNebula can be seen as an open source incarnation of the VMware vCloud cloud model,” he explained.

The open-sourcing of OpenNebulaApps will have some casualties in OpenNebula’s own ecosystem – after all, there’s overlap with projects such as RIM’s Carina environment manager that were designed to run on top of OpenNebula.

“Yes, this is going to be a problem,” Llorente said. “[Various users] are providing functionality on top of OpenNebula and we are now releasing components with similar functionality, but this is an open ecosystem. Users can decide which solution they want to use.”

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Steve Herrod (left) and I onstage at Structure 2012.
(c)2012 Pinar Ozger pinar@pinarozger.com

I think this is a big loss for VMware, which has already been hemorrhaging technical talent to younger, nimbler companies (and CIO Mark Egan left in December). But even as VMware grew older and more staid, Herrod always seemed to push the envelope. SpringSource, Cloud Foundry, Project Serengeti, software-defined data centers — all of these are bets on a future of application development and data center management — things that don’t pay VMware’s bills today.

Now, former CEO Paul Maritz is heading the Pivotal Initiative (essentially a mix of the cloud and data business lines from VMware and parent company EMC), and former EMC exec Pat Gelsinger took Martiz’s role at VMware. With VMware narrowing its focus back to servers and virtualization, it’s possible there isn’t too much room for innovation within Herrod’s old company.

Getting into the VC space, of course, means Herrod can spend a lot more time trying to shape the future by finding, supporting and financing the new companies trying to carry VMware’s initial vision into the next generation.

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Check out the rest of our Structure Europe 2012 live coverage here, and a video recording of the session follows below.

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Thanks to virtualization, he explained, applications are insulated from the infrastructure and “you can truly attack [server management] in a way you couldn’t have in the past.” But, he added, there’s a catch: While hosting multiple applications on the same server and spinning virtual servers up and down via software saved companies money, they wanted more. The advent of cloud computing showed companies what’s possible when you can dynamically move workloads and, indeed, whole VMs around a set of resources as policies might demand.

And that, Strong said, requires turning the black art of networking into a simple, automated function that even laypeople can handle. More importantly, you have to make it “application-centric rather than device-centric,” so that networking, compute and storage react in accordance with what applications want rather than serving as limiters on what an application can do. “All people truly care about is their apps at the end of the day,” he said.

However, as most IT professionals are aware, we haven’t yet reached this nirvana of intelligent software managing dumb hardware all with the application’s needs in mind. Strong’s colleague, VMware CTO for EMEA Joe Baguley explained that although VMware has shipped enough licenses for its vSwitch product to make it the world’s third-largest switch vendor (without ever having shipped a piece of hardware), there still are plenty of obstacles to be overcome. Some of them, of course, are cultural: Baguley noted a recent discussion with a CIO who wasn’t aware he could run a heterogeneous server architecture underneath his VMware hypervisor.

But that shouldn’t be too discouraging, Baguley said, because the change will happen. You can see the evidence, such as a fewer number of ASICs are being developed for networking gear, and the excitement around products such as new VMware property Nicira. Everything that’s currently being done in hardware will eventually be done in software, he said: “You only have to look at compute and storage to know that’s true.”

Check out the rest of our Structure Europe 2012 live coverage here, and a video recording of the session follows below.

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Update: Nimble has been remarkably successful since it began shipping its hybrid flash-plus-hard-drive gear two years ago. The company, which focuses on small and mid-size enterprises, has amassed more than 1,100 deployments across more than 600 customers and hopes to be bringing in quarterly revenue between $25 million and $35 million relatively soon, Vasudevan said during a recent interview. It comes up against large vendors such as NetApp, Dell and EMC about 85 percent of the time, he added, and it typically wins those deals.

Flash storage is a white-hot market right now because of the significant performance and efficiency improvements it provides over hard drives — important considerations in a world where virtualization reigns supreme — and because the gap in price between the two is closing fast. In the past several months, EMC paid $430 million for all-flash startup XtremIO, while Violin Memory ($80 million) and Pure Storage ($40 million) have both brought in hefty investments. Nutanix and Tintri, both of which, like Nimble, fuse flash and hard drives and target mid-market businesses, recently raised $33 million and $25 million, respectively.

Putting both flash drives and hard disks in the same array means customers can save money on bulk storage while still getting the flash performance boost where it’s needed. As I explained when covering Nimble’s previous funding round in July 2011, customers seem to love the flexibility of its appliances. They can change the ratio of flash to hard to disk capacity to suit their needs, and some customers even use a single Nimble appliance for both primary storage and backup (with hot data in flash and backup data on the spinning disks).

Nimble is eyeing late 2013 or or 2014 for its IPO, Vasudevan said, although it raised its final funding six to nine months before it planned to because outside firms kept approaching it with aggressive and attractive term sheets. In the end, Nimble took money from all of its existing investors as well as newcomer GGV Capital. Vasudevan said the new investment will help fuel international expansion as well as a planned surge in headcount over the next 18 months.

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