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The truth about Cloud computing

Posted on 28 Apr 2009 at 12:18

Steve Cassidy attends this year's annual VMware convention in Cannes, and is beset from all sides by the magical c-word.

In an almost exact repeat of last year's homily, VMware's poster boy from one gargantuan quasi-monopoly revealed that to tick all the boxes when implementing VMware, it helps if you deliver everything via web pages in short, simple, low-cost transactions. This is great news for VMware's new management, which has changed since last year. Maritz is ex-Microsoft, and Mr Honeyball lost no time in telling me how well-regarded he had been while sorting out the troubles of the Windows development team: no doubt this stood him in good stead when taking over as VMware's chief executive.

I escaped from the ambit of VMware's spin doctors for a while and it didn't take me long to discover that a lot of the Cloud pronouncements, especially the ones involving Germans with server farms so homogeneous in presentation and uniform in workload that they reminded me of the unctuous consistency of pate de foie gras, were in fact symptoms of a dose of Muddy Shoes syndrome. Neither VMware's focus on service provider demos, nor its forward-thinking proclamations of cloudism, appeared to be echoed down on the show floor. In fact, these occasions barely counted as demonstrations at all.

Traditionally, a demo at a show involves a senior person in a standard-bearer role getting up on stage to either pull a comic stunt or to show us that he/she can get down and dirty with the product. For example, a major feature of the first "corporate" Apple Mac was that it could be built without tools, so Apple's big cheese of the day took to the stage with a carrier bag full of parts and clipped them all together, then gave his presentation using the Mac he'd just assembled. VMware could hardly have shown a stronger commitment to Cloud computing (and faith in the connectivity of this convention centre with 4,700 laptop-carrying Wi-Fi users in the audience) than it did by these demos, which all consisted of projected web pages.

There were no blinkenlights visible anywhere, nor any humming racks of gear wheeled out to wow the crowd. There was probably more physical CPU power present in the audience's smartphones than there was on the stage for these demos. And this is indeed how it's supposed to work. Write a nice contract with your happy, non-proprietorial Cloud provider, ship off all your high-intensity computing jobs to it and it will deal with the grubby business of making it happen. No need to discuss hardware ranges, server releases or tuning information because in the cloudy future that won't be your problem - you're now just the owner of some data. But for me the real demos were going on downstairs.

At a lot of conventions the show floor is perceived as the main event, with dancing girls in Lycra, loud noises and lots of fake bonhomie. At VMworld things aren't like that. Instead, most delegates want the hard facts from the breakout sessions. The floor with little booths and stands was made to double-up as the inter-session canteen too, in an attempt to drag these hard-bitten ubernerds away from the small real-world presentations and actually place them within firing range of some salesmen and suppliers.

As an undisciplined and sneaky hack, I was able to skip the conference schedule and watch as these hordes descended on the show floor like a pack of hungry wolves. Remember that this year's VMworld is taking place in the middle of the steepest economic slowdown in living memory, and yet attendance is fractionally up compared with last year. Companies that are "doing virtualisation" are less likely to dispose of their clued-up techies than almost any other role, and all these guys know it. Some of them were actually running from one appointment to the next.