Cisco/EMC cloud packages proprietary, but may not cause lock-in

Cisco and EMC are hopping aboard the private cloud bandwagon and, not surprisingly, claim a package containing only their own technology is what enterprises need to build an internal cloud network.

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But while the Cisco/EMC venture may seem to introduce a potential for vendor lock-in, that doesn't necessarily have to be the case.

Several internal cloud vendors have argued that the key to building private clouds is the aggregation of many types of technologies from rival vendors into a centrally managed computing pool, and have built software to achieve that. While the Cisco/EMC cloud package consists of the two companies' proprietary systems, it could still be integrated into existing private cloud networks, industry observers say.

Cisco and EMC on Tuesday unveiled Vblock Infrastructure packages, containing hardware from Cisco and EMC and virtualization software from the EMC-owned VMware. The configurations will support thousands of virtual machines and the companies are marketing them as ready-made private clouds.

That's a significantly different approach than the one taken by vendors such as Platform Computing and Eucalyptus Systems, which have each developed software packages that take a customer's existing equipment, regardless of vendor, and aggregate them into large resource pools.

Platform's ISF software, for example, aggregates servers, storage, networking tools and hypervisors to create a shared pool of physical and virtual resources. Those pools could potentially include the Vblock Infrastructure packages developed by Cisco and EMC, says Martin Harris, director of product management for Platform. Within a Platform ISF cloud, the Cisco/EMC packages would become just another set of hardware and software that can be provisioned to applications as needed, he says.

"From Platform's standpoint, one of the key areas to be cognizant of when building a private cloud is to make sure you're not locked into one vendor's strategy," Harris says.

But the Cisco/EMC packages should prove to be complementary to the Platform strategy, he says. "We see opportunities for our private cloud initiatives to work in concert with what's been announced by EMC, Cisco and VMware."

Using the Cisco/EMC cloud tools alone could be limiting, Harris argues, because not every application is ready to run in a virtual machine. A better approach, he says, is to build resource pools that contain both physical and virtual servers.

Eucalyptus CEO Woody Rollins credited Cisco and EMC for giving customers an easy way to embrace internal cloud computing. "Making it easy for people to experiment with and deploy on-premise or private clouds is a really good move," Rollins says.

Still, many customers prefer being able to combine various technologies over a one-size-fits-all approach that introduces the risk of vendor lock-in, he says.

"What they're trying to do with Vblock is create a turnkey approach and I think that's fine, as long as you want what it does out of the box," Rollins says. "But it's not very open and it isn't very flexible."