{"id":647180,"date":"2013-03-17T10:44:06","date_gmt":"2013-03-17T14:44:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/?p=621389"},"modified":"2013-03-17T10:44:06","modified_gmt":"2013-03-17T14:44:06","slug":"the-week-in-cloud-vmware-fesses-up-amazon-churns-out-features-newvem-watches-amazon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/647180","title":{"rendered":"The week in cloud: VMware fesses up; Amazon churns out features; Newvem watches Amazon"},"content":{"rendered":"

VMware, at last, comes clean about its AWS killer<\/span><\/p>\n

Remember last July when our own Om Malik and Stacey Higginbotham reported on VMware\u2019s plan to take on Amazon with a cloud of its own?\u00a0<\/a>\u00a0Remember VMware denying it? <\/a>\u00a0Well, last Wednesday it all became official with the announcement of\u00a0VMware Hybrid Cloud services<\/a> \u2014 in which VMware will host its own public cloud that will be sold by existing VMware partners.<\/p>\n

Gartner\u2019s Chris Wolf has an interesting take on his blog here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Now, there is some wiggle room for VMware here. Our original story showed the big cloud coming out of the then-unannounced spin-off of VMware and EMC That spinoff \u2014 the Pivotal Initiative<\/a> \u2014 did happen, but it appears that it\u2019s VMware, not Pivotal, that\u2019s running the big cloud. Paul Maritz the former CEO of VMware and now the head of Pivotal, will be speaking this week at GigaOM\u2019s Structure: Data<\/a>\u00a0in New York.<\/p>\n

Amazon adds beefs up Virtual Private Cloud<\/h2>\n

It was an even more busy week than normal for Amazon itself which unveiled new Virtual Private Cloud capabilities <\/a>for AWS users. Launched 4 years ago Amazon VPC lets users create \u201ca\u00a0virtual network of logically isolated EC2 instances and an optional VPN connection to your own data center,\u201d according to the AWS blog. what\u2019s new now is that soon, when a new customer launches EC2 instances, they will do so in the\u00a0\u201dEC2-VPC\u201d platform.<\/p>\n

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\u201cYou don\u2019t need to create a VPC beforehand \u2013 simply launch EC2 instances or provision Elastic Load Balancers, RDS databases, or ElastiCache clusters like you would in EC2-Classic and we\u2019ll create a VPC for you at no extra charge.\u00a0 We\u2019ll launch your resources into that VPC and assign each EC2 instance a public IP address.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

At that point you can assign multiple IP addresses to a single instance, change security group membership on the fly, and add egress filters to those groups.<\/p>\n

One of Amazon\u2019s weak points when it comes to the enterprise accounts it wants to attract is the unwillingness of IT pros \u2014 especially in heavily regulated businesses \u2014 to put mission critical workloads on shared public cloud infrastructure. This new VPC capability might make them more amenable to using AWS at a time when more and more \u201cprivate\u201d cloud options \u2014 from competitors Rackspace, HP, and others are coming on line. GCN<\/a> has more on VPC.<\/p>\n

\"awsconsole\"<\/a>Also new his week: AWS tripled the amount of storage<\/a> that can be associated with each RDB (Relational Database) instance.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can now create DB instances (MySQL or Oracle) with up to 3 TB of storage (the previous limit was 1 TB) and 30,000 IOPS (previously, 10,000). SQL Server DB Instances can be created with up to 1TB of storage and 10,000 IOPS.\u201d<\/p>\n

And, Amazon also launched a version of its mobile AWS console for iPhone<\/a>\u00a0so It types can see what\u2019s going on with their Amazon cloud when they\u2019re not at their desks. An Android version of the console\u00a0debuted in January.<\/p>\n

this public cloud war will only get more interesting if, as has been reported here<\/a> and elsewhere, that IBM is in the market for SoftLayer and\/or Rackspace. \u00a0If IBM ends up making either of those rather substantial purchase \u2014 Reuters<\/a> put a $2 billion price tag on SoftLayer and Rackspace would be much more \u2014 it would only show how critical IBM sees this market that it would spend that kind of dough after already investing billions in its own cloud infrastructure.<\/p>\n

Working with your Frenemy: Newvem debuts AWS heat map<\/h2>\n

Newvem is the energizer bunny of AWS watchers. Amazon keeps\u00a0\u201ctotally copying\u201d\u00a0<\/a>Newvem\u2019s capabilities (in the words of Newvem CEO Zev Laderman) and Newvem just keeps on adding more capabilities.<\/p>\n

\"Utilization<\/a>Newvem, the Israeli company obsessed with showing you more about your Amazon Web Services use than you know, was at it again this week, unveiling its\u00a0Cloud Utilization Heat map\u00a0<\/a>that shows AWS users their utilization over multiple regions by time, machine type and availability zone.<\/p>\n

The sales pitch?A substantive portion (15 percent) of the clouds Newvem analyzes now are underutilized. That means \u201c$30 million of $200 million EC2 spending tracked is wasted,\u201d says Newvem spokesman Cameron Peron. Presumably if you know what resources are being wasted you can make moves to streamline operations and run things optimally. Sell off reserved instances<\/a>\u00a0you\u2019re not using, for example.<\/p>\n

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\"Newvem<\/a><\/dt>\n
Newvem CEO Zev Laderman (left) and AWS CTO Werner Vogels.<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n

Here\u2019s my guess: Newvem has focused 100 percent on AWS to this point. But as Amazon keeps adding more of its own dashboard and monitoring alerts, I would bet Newvem, like other monitoring companies, will soon turn its eye to other clouds as well. After all,\u00a0multi-cloud deployments<\/a>\u00a0are one tactic large companies are looking at to avoid locking into a single provider.<\/p>\n

That Amazon competes with its own partners<\/a>\u00a0is certainly not new. It\u2019s been going on for years as we\u2019ve reported. The company, like Microsoft or IBM before it, treads a fine line between relying on smaller, nimbler partners to come up with innovative new services, and then adding more value-added services itself.\u00a0Amazon launched a partner program\u00a0<\/a>last year to help navigate this terrain.<\/p>\n

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