The battle is about the desktop as much as the cloud
The Windows Azure Appliance that Microsoft announced on Monday combines cloud services and virtualization with an on-premises flexible server, networking, storage. Partners for the device include Dell, HP, Fujitsu. Sound familiar? It should. The appliance takes on the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) platform, a product that heartily contributed to Cisco’s estrangement with HP. HP has made it a mission to offer a networking product portfolio that lets users build a 100% Cisco-less environment.
Cisco’s goal is to eat some datacenter pie. It owns its primary market of Ethernet networking gear and has been pushing into new markets in pursuit of growth. Cisco has clearly aligned itself with Microsoft’s enemy VMware, not only via Acadia, but also in other ways. For instance, Cisco delivers its Nexus 1000V Series, which are software-based switches that operate inside the VMware hypervisor. But Cisco has been fair over which hypervisors UCS supports. It supports Hyper-V (though Vblock, obviously, doesn’t). Last month Cisco announced that its Cisco’s Virtual Network Link (VN-Link) technology is now integrated with Red Hat Enterprise KVM Virtualization, too.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is only keeping one eye in the datacenter. It is motivated to keep you, the enterprise user, interested in its highly profitable fat clients. If you can forget the fact that his position is self-serving, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer makes a compelling argument that rich cloud services coupled with rich clients is nirvana.
This quote is from his keynote speech on Monday at Worldwide Partner Conference 2010 in Washington, D.C.:
“Many people, especially in corporate IT, will say, once I move to the cloud, I’m only going to use thin clients. I don’t believe that at all. I don’t believe that the cloud is a place where thin clients will take over.
“Time and time again, we have seen the advantage of the rich client. …
“The world of tomorrow is a world of smart cloud talking to smart devices. We and the people we compete with may disagree on whose smart client. You’ll get a different answer from everybody. HTML 5, in fact, which we very much embrace, it’s a form of smart client technology. The whole notion is software comes down from the cloud and it executes locally. It may execute just to a standards-based infrastructure, it may take more advantage of the intelligence and capability of the client operating system and devices, but rich is the No. 1 path forward. It’s what consumers will want.
“We will support thin client infrastructure. Certainly in the last year you’ve seen us embrace VDI very, very aggressively. So, we will support thin client scenarios, particularly for customers who just absolutely want to keep all of their data locked up centrally, which at least today may be for a set of compliance or other reasons.
‘But we will drive these smart client devices to be easier and easier and easier to manage.”
I’m of mixed opinions. It is true that consumer devices such as cell phones have become more intelligent and we’ve all benefited by having one smart device that can run a spreadsheet and make a phone call. But when services are delivered primarily through the cloud, the client might as well be a thin, cheap netbook that does little more but run a browser and plug into a variety of networks (3G/4G, WiFi, LANs/WANs). We simply don’t need the client growing fatter, becoming more important.We certainly don’t need our TVs and phones needing the kind of upkeep that a Windows PC needs.
A thin client gets rid of the biggest albatross around an enterprise IT’s neck — desktop management and security.
Note that Dell is playing both sides. Last month reports surfaced that talks are under way between Google and Dell to bring Chrome OS, the search giant’s cloud-centric operating system, to Dell’s computer lineup, according to a Dell executive.
Microsoft is also insisting that the partners selling the Windows Azure appliance use it in their own datacenters and on top of that, Team Azure also managed to sign up eBay as a user. eBay plans to use it in two of its data centers to run applications such as its iPad auction listings. Meanwhile, HP’s enterprise services group will be running the Windows Azure appliance internally. That’s just icing. Microsoft’s need for HP is the networking piece — it can’t go to Cisco.
Details on how much Windows Azure Appliance will cost and what it will really look like remain remarkably thin. While Dell reportedly said it planned to have a Windows Azure Platform Appliance running by January 2011, no one has mentioned when the appliance will be available for enterprise purchase. The appliance is likely to be pretty big, too, consisting of a multiple servers and network gear running in a large metal box … not the typical 2U rack device that is typically dubbed an “appliance.”
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