Red Hat on why VMware's prospects in cloud are bleak

BANGALORE, INDIA: Bryan Che, senior director & general manager, Cloud Business Unit, Red Hat Inc. during an interaction with Deepa Damodaran of CIOL tells why Red Hat stands a better chance to succeed against VMware in the world of cloud and why it is bullish about the APAC market. Excerpts:

 

CIOL: Red Hat has always been associated with virtualization and open source, but now you are also into cloud. How important is it for Red Hat?

Bryan Che: Cloud is very important because today the industry is moving towards it, and at the same time we see that not all technology companies will probably move in that direction.

Red Hat is uniquely positioned because of our technology and product portfolio. If you take a look at all the other public cloud providers that are out there right now, they are all building on top of open source technology, or open source virtualization, Linux in particular, which come from Red Hat.

That gives us a footprint. Moreover, people are building on our architectures that are already software based ones.

On top of virtualization and Linux, we also have JBoss, from a middleware point of view, and other cloud technologies ranging from open and cloud stack, cloud share, to Red Hat storage. These play a part in the making of a complete cloud architecture.

There are only two companies in the industry that have all the components required to build a complete cloud architecture - Red Hat and Microsoft.

However, no one is building cloud on Microsoft because they are too expensive and very proprietary in nature, and are not open source based.

An interesting dynamic shift that is happening is that in traditional data centres Microsoft and Windows had 80 per cent of the market share, whereas, Linux had only 20 per cent. However, in cloud workloads, it is the vice versa. Linux now has about 70-80 per cent of the market share, whereas, cloud windows has a very small portion.

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CIOL: Today, VMware is also talking about cloud. Your take on that?

Bryan Che: VMware has built a very strong business on virtualization and are clearly the market leaders. However, when it comes to cloud computing, VMware is in a very difficult position for a couple of reasons. First, virtualization is not cloud computing and if you take a look at the climate for virtualization and for cloud computing they are actually pretty different from what VMware has been strong in.

Moreover, they can not offer an open cloud. VMware is focused on a very narrow portion of the overall IT infrastructure. They are saying, 'I can make your virtualization much more manageable'. i e they can help you when you have too many VMs in order give self-provisioning, or when you have too many virtualization clusters all over the place that needs to be aggregated into cloud.

But, they do not have the ability to deal with the physical infrastructure. They do not work with Amazon, the most popular cloud out there.

The other problem that VMware has is that their portfolio is very limited, for example, Cloud Foundry, which is a platform-as-a-service offering from VMware. A PaaS requires two things - platform and service.

However, Cloud Foundry deals only with the service part because VMware does not own an enterprise platform. They do not have an operating system at all and only have some lightweight frameworks and middleware applications.

Whereas, we can build platform-as-a-service because we have an operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise portfolio, Java certified EE Platforms service, or ruby or python or NOJS or Pearl. Moreover, we have mechanisms with which you can plug in anything that will run on top of Linux.

Whereas, Cloud Foundry can only run Spring and TomCat on it because they do not have a platform. They can give you automation from a management stand point, but they can not give you full cloud experience because they do not have the full technology stack necessary for that.

The other thing that they do not have is the ability to deal with data inside cloud. For example, if I have have virtual machines running on top of VMware, and also have another public cloud running on Amazon and want to use capacity across both - i e to get my data from VMware over to Amazon and then back to my data centre - then VMware cannot help.

VMware has no mechanism to do that. Its architecture has been entirely around pockets of virtualization clusters that are totally independent of each other. They do not have the infrastructure to build up those kinds of capabilities, whereas, Red Hat does because we have a storage solution, Red Hat storage, built from the Gluster capabilities.

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CIOL: Why is open cloud so important. The industry has been functioning in the traditional manner all this while, so why change now?

Bryan Che: Let me give a specific example to illustrate what happens when you do not have an open cloud. One of our customers was running a very large software-as-a-service cloud company. He had hosted a part of the infrastructure on Amazon servers and another in his private date centre. However, when the outage hit Amazon last year the servers got disconnected.

What should have ideally happened is that since he had a private cloud, the workloads could have switched over to it, however, since its cloud management software was also hosted on Amazon, it also went down. So even though they had a private cloud, it was no of no use.

So now they are implementing a brand new cloud solution and have to throw away everything that they had done so far because their cloud was not open and was locked into one particulate set of technologies and vendor.

Moreover, enterprises have complex heterogeneous architectures. No one is using the entire data centre software from one company. So if your cloud only works with one particular vendor technology, what are you going to do with the rest of your infrastructure?

This is the initial stage of cloud computing and you do not know what is going to happen in future. So you do not want to lock yourself in.

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CIOL: How important is enterprise segment for Red Hat?

Bryan Che: The enterprise market is very important to us. It is where we make all our money from. From 2002, when we introduced Red Hat Enterprise Linux, all the way to 2012, we make all our money selling to enterprise customers. All of our software is open source and so we have lots and lots of people using it. Even individual developers can download our stuff . The way we build our business and make our money are entirely from enterprise software space.

CIOL: As a market how important is India for Red Hat?

Bryan Che: India is an important market for Red Hat. From an enterprise software stand point of view, now is right opportunity. There is a lot of Unix systems in the market, which are being switched over to Linux. Moreover, cloud is gaining here.

We have a very good developer community here. Red Hat has strong engineering offices across multiple cities in the region. The engineering team of Gluster, which we acquired last year, is based in Bangalore. We are investing heavily in that team. We had opened a new office facility earlier this year and have also increased the size of the facility and will be investing heavily in terms of bringing up additional engineers around the development cluster portfolio from here.

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CIOL: Will it be possible to share details of investment and growth that you are looking forward to from this market?

Bryan Che: I do not have specific figures in terms of the Indian market. Roughly about 20 per cent of our business is being done over APAC. However, this is a very fast growing region compared to the other matured regions, especially Europe which is under the grip of economies uncertainties.

CIOL: What are the trends that you see in the Indian market that is of interest to Red Hat?

Bryan: We are headquartered in the US and so started our business from there. The first wave of business that made us very successful was by taking market share away from Unix systems. People were running big Unix hardware, Sun Solaris systems and things like that. We saw a tremendous success in migrating such systems to Linux in markets such as North America, Europe and so on.

Now, we have got many other products in our portfolio and have been accelerating the adoption of these technologies. If I take a look at the India market I still see a lot of Unix systems here and also see a lot of interest for Linux systems.

In cloud computing, all that architecture is being done on top of Linux and have been done on top of x86 infrastructure.

The India market is following the same pattern, but with a twist. Now that cloud is here, it gives the market an opportunity to make a leapfrog. The US went through a 10-year period to just move from Unix to Linux and now it has started to move to cloud.

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CIOL: What are the challenges that you see in the enterprise segment when it comes to cloud?

Bryan Che: Enterprises need to understand that cloud way of doing IT is much more efficient, agile, and cost effective manner than the traditional mode. However, their problem is that they have to also deal with the complexity of their existing applications, since they have to run a business.

First, such companies need to look at how to build a cloud architecture and a cloud strategy that can encompass what they are doing currently. However, that does not mean it should implement cloud at one go or say in the next six months.

Cloud is a multi-year journey, because you are dealing with so many different systems. Choose a cloud architecture and a cloud approach that are eventually going to give you the ability to expand across everything that you are doing currently. You should accept the fact that it is going to take you some time to get there.

Also, pick some incremental place to start with so as to get more immediate value, such as a new development lab.

Also, make sure that your cloud is architected in a way that it has the ability to take an increment in every step along the way, but at the same time each of those incremental steps is compatible with the last one.

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CIOL: What is your take on cloud security concerns?

Bryan Che: It is a little bit of both perception and reality. There is no uniform answer.

Security is a multi-faceted thing and is not just about the cloud being secure. It is also about the solution that is architect using a set of technologies that meet government or other regulatory policies.

You can construct a very secure solution, but it depends on how you actually build it up

A typical case is 'I can't ever move to a public cloud because I am forbidden from a regulatory stand point'.

There are quite a lot of things that we are building from a whole technology portfolio to make sure that the customer has the ability to run securely in the cloud.

However, one of the things that we have done is with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, where we have built in a lot of cloud security features. One such technology is called SELinux, jointly developed with the US National Security agency.

What it provides is a very strong guarantee that even if there is a security bug or a memory leak, your applications will be locked down and they can only do things that you have given explicit permissions to do. The data is secure even if there is a bug in the operating system or somewhere else running at an application level.

Now because we use this as a foundation of the platform in open shift this means that when you take your application from open shift under Amazon or VMware, or Red Hat that security is now embedded into an application itself and we crack that into the platform-as-a-service capability So, now I am much less dependent on Amazon providing me that security because I have made my security portable by putting it into the operating system itself and so now when I go into Amazon if there is a bug in Amazon in their hypervisor, my data is safe.

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CIOL: How can enterprise move on to cloud using the existing infrastructure?

Bryan Che: It is one of the benefits of adopting an open hybrid cloud strategy. Customers have already

invested in all sorts of architectures. All these workloads run on physical systems.

VMware would say the only way you can get a cloud is if you install VMware and migrate everything over to VMware. In such a circumstance the enterprise will have to throw away other investments which are are non-VMware.

The Red Hat approach is to say let us give you an open hybrid cloud and work with your choice of physical systems, or virtualization, or public cloud providers, so that you do not have to throw the existing infrastructure.

You build cloud on top of your existing infrastructure and aggregate it together because we can deal with heterogeneous technologies and give you that open architecture. So now I have the password and do not have to throw it away and I can manage that complexity into a common cloud.

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CIOL: As a company what are the challenges you see in the market?

Bryan Che: There are several challenges and opportunities for us. From a global perspective we are in a transition mode towards cloud computing. With every major transition there is going to be winners and losers.

We are still in early days of the cloud. All public clouds and the earlier clouds till date have been built on earlier technology stack. One of the challenges is how do we continue to drive forward so that the customers can get more and more benefits of the cloud.

We have a very strong portfolio but we need to advance these capabilities to make it consumable for the customers. We have operating system, virtualization, middleware, storage, management and so on but when I bring that to a customer; how are they going to get all that and start to build a cloud.

It is very complex to put all that software together. We are trying to simplify that for our customer so that when they come to us we can say here is cloud and it is already built together, so that you just have to buy and configure.

Economic times are very challenging, however, it also gives us a very strong opportunity because in these difficult times companies see more and more value of open source software. Now the challenge is to show them how to save money and at the same increase value from the usage of open source as against proprietary software.

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CIOL: How will cloud computing change in the next five years?

Bryan Che: It is very difficult to say what is going to be happening five years from now because the technology is changing rapidly. I think that is partly why we have been very diligent by putting a very open architecture because I think that we still expect that five years from now companies are going to have heterogeneous capabilities.

And, even if they implement cloud the question is how do they migrate towards cloud from where they are today? The only way they can do that is step by step and not by a total rip and replace.

We do not know what new innovation is going to come, but definitely there will be innovations. We know who are the strong players today, but tomorrow there could be someone else who comes up with a great new technology.

So we want to build on the flexibility so that when that technology does come along we will be able to take advantage of it.

You will see many other areas of the industry starting to get commoditized. We will see a lot of Unix to Linux migration in the first wave. This will start to happen in a lot of areas, such as storage, networking and so on. The fundamental cloud infrastructure will improve.

These improvements will be to to sustain higher speed interconnect between various different things that are going to come, or when new workloads from mobile applications start generating even more data than we are seeing today.

I think that is going to put more pressure to move towards pure software open source solutions because at that kind of scale no one is going to be able to afford proprietary solutions that people are doing today.

CIOL: What are the newer technologies that Red Hat is looking ahead for?

Bryan Che: Today, if you put a cloud infrastructure in place, you need a more dynamic way to be able to manage workloads and other things that go into these clouds.

We have already started some investments across them, for example one of our products; cloud forms.

Cloud is changing a lot of the traditional lines that have been drawn in the industry. Now, we have infrastructure companies, middleware companies, management companies and so on. Cloud computing is blending a lot of these capabilities together. You can not have cloud computing without management and infrastructure, it integrates the two capabilities together and so that means that I need to have very different ways in terms of how I manage my workloads in this new world of cloud.

Cloud enables self-service. i e a developer can come and get self-service access to get into their environment, unlike before.

Before, IT has been managing environments, they provision a set of box, and had control over configurations and versions and software, could run patch etc.

In the new world of cloud IT has no longer provisioning the software. It is all done by a developer who does not care for the security, or regulations.

So, how will IT know what was provisioned via self-service and how are they going to manage it in this new model. This is one of the areas that Red Hat is aggressively investing in.

We have started to introduce such capabilities into two of our software, which we are going to grow significantly over time.

Moreor, going forward another challenge that IT will face is that how is it going to manage applications when some of their capacity is sitting in Amazon, while some other will be in VMware environment. They need to have the same tools working across this entire infrastructure so that they can go from test on Amazon over to production on VMware. Another challenge they will come across is how to migrate those applications seamlessly.

These are the kind of capabilities that we are investing in because with cloud when things become much more dynamic and fluid. However, it does not stand to do good if you have a fluid environment, but cannot bring application management capabilities to run on top of that . So that is one big area of investment that we are making from a Red Hat's perspective.