Red Hat cloud strategy general manager Bryan Che is out with a blog post today that takes some harsh shots at rival VMware.
For background, VMware this week announced a new “one cloud, any app, any device” strategy. Read more about that here and check out our conversation with VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger here.
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Here’s Red Hat’s take on that news. Surprise, surprise they think they can do better:
“VMware’s vision for One Cloud and OpenStack sounds appealing--one unified cloud for running both cloud-native and traditional applications--but it is fundamentally flawed in implementation because these two classes of workloads have quite different requirements for infrastructure. And, by attempting to mash these two worlds together, all One Cloud provides is one limited cloud that is not optimized to run any workload.”
Read the whole critique here.
Red Hat is throwing some punches at VMware's new hybrid cloud strategy.
Che continues with more targeted criticism. His basic point is that vSphere - VMware’s virtualization management platform - is not an ideal platform for running OpenStack. As an IaaS cloud software, OpenStack is meant to have access to a large capacity of VMs that can scale up and down quickly, with applications running in the cloud being able to survive VMs that go down.
vSphere, on the other hand, has limits to the number of VMs. VMware recently increased that, but Che argues that having limited VM capacity goes against the architectural nature of an OpenStack cloud. “So, while you can run OpenStack on top of vSphere, you limit the capabilities of OpenStack for running cloud-native apps. And, OpenStack is not optimized to run traditional workloads, so you end up with one cloud that runs both cloud-native and traditional apps, but neither very well,” Che wrote.
Of course Che has an obvious answer to all these issues: Use Red Hat. He goes on to make the case that Red Hat’s “open hybrid cloud” is natively designed to run both traditional and cloud-first apps. Components include the Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, storage, middleware/PaaS and management. It makes public cloud connections with partners who run OpenStack clouds.
VMware will have to deal with criticisms like this. The company has a stronghold in the compute virtualization market, and it has a strong case for offering customers a public cloud platform based on that same management software. In a partnership with Google it gives customers a massive scale-out cloud. But competitors will jab at each other. That’s just the nature of the business.